Aphorisms

Mina Loy always considered herself more of a visual rather than a verbal artist. She was born in London in 1882, and first established a reputation as a post-Impressionist painter. She lived in Paris during the early years of the 20th century and was involved in all of the artistic movements of the time: dadaism, futurism, surrealism. She moved to the U.S. in 1916, and in 1921 Ezra Pound wrote to Marianne Moore, editor of Poetry magazine: “Is there anyone in America except you, Bill [William Carlos Williams] and Mina Loy who can write anything of interest in verse?” One of Loy’s verses, “Aphorisms on Futurism,” is an aphorism sequence as much as it is a poem. My thanks Lori Ellison for alerting me to Mina Loy. Excerpted aphorisms:

THE velocity of velocities arrives in starting.

LOVE the hideous to find the sublime core of it.

LOVE of others is an appreciation of one’s self.

MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.

TIME is the dispersion of intensiveness.

THE Futurist can live a thousand years in one poem.

Do aphorisms proselytize? I suppose they do, but in a uniquely non-dogmatic way. They raise more questions than they answer. If anything, they undermine faith—faith in a particular political philosophy, faith in a football team, faith in human nature in general, faith in yourself in particular, faith in a god—rather than support it. And they often do that through humor, the best antidote for excessive certainty. Even someone as serious as Aristotle recognized the importance of jokes:

Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.

Often, things are not always as copasetic as they seem, and an aphorism can help restore your faith—faith in a particular political philosophy, faith in a football team, etc…—by challenging it. Any faith that does not welcome, and cannot withstand, a challenge is not much of a faith at all. My favorite aphorism on the subject is by the always-challenging Karl Kraus:

It is an enigma to me how a theologian can be praised because he has struggled his way to unbelief. The achievement that always struck me as most heroic and praiseworthy was struggling through to belief.

In that spirit, here’s some more fun with faith-based aphorisms:

Drive through any small town or suburb in America and you’ll see them: the signposts outside churches and other places of worship advertising the next service or sporting some verse from the Bible.

Some churches seem to be getting into the aphorism business, at least judging by these aphoristic snapshots sent to me courtesy of Joseph F. Conte.

Read these, and be redeemed:

I’m indebted to my cousin, Matt, for sending me a sample copy of Bits & Pieces, “the magazine that motivates the world.” It’s a peculiar publication: a tiny pamphlet, just 24 pages, with nothing but quotations, aphorisms and inspirational stories in it, kind of like Reader’s Digest’s “Quotable Quotes” in booklet form. Bits & Pieces is published by Ragan’s Motivational Resources, whose publications are, according to the company website, “designed to bring you hope, lift your spirits, and encourage you to stretch toward your potential.” The authors are a mix of celebrities, writers and business executives, most of whom I had never heard of before. Some bits and pieces I found uplifting:

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. —Susan Ertz

Truce is better than friction. —Charles Herguth

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do. —Freya Madeline Stark

Worry is a misuse of the imagination. —Dan Zadra

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

The New York Times ran an interesting article on the origins of the fortune cookie recently, “Solving a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Cookie“. It details research that suggests the fortune cookie is a Japanese, not a Chinese, invention. The popularity of the fortune cookie as an after-dinner treat is relatively recent, dating back to around the beginning of the 20th century. But Yasuko Nakamachi, wo spent six years tracing the history of the snack, has found evidence that it originated in Japan in the late 19th century. Previous theories suggested a proto-fortune cookie was the “moon cake,” baked in China in the 14th century. Whatever the true origins, the fortunes inside the cookies are certainly changing with the times. Nakamachi recently found this one in Japan:

To ward off lower back pain or joint problems, undertake some at-home measures like yoga.

Surely a case of new age wisdom packaged in very old dough… The Times piece also contains some 500 reader comments answering the question, What is the most memorable fortune you’ve found in a fortune cookie?, including this one:

Your face is like a welcome mat.

and the ever-popular:

That was not really chicken…

Michael Dirda has to have to the best job in the world: He reads books, and writes about them, for a living. He is a longtime columnist for the Washington Post Book World, and in 1993 won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. For the past 40 years or so, Dirda has kept a “commonplace notebook, the volume into which I have copied out favorite passages from my reading … In it are poems, clever sayings, lines from Shakespeare and the Bible and many, many sentences and paragraphs from half-forgotten works of fiction and nonfiction. At least a third of the entries might be loosely categorized as aphorisms.” In his eclectic and engaging memoir Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life, Dirda shares some favorite sayings from his commonplace archive. Book by Book is a paean to the act of reading as well as a meditation on the practical uses of literature in daily life. A selection from Dirda’s “life lines”:

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. —Joseph Conrad

Where is your Self to be found? Always in the deepest enchantment you have experienced. —Hugo von Hofmannsthal

In life, I have learned, there is always worse to come. —Julian Maclaren-Ross

Who speaks of victory? To endure is everything. —Rainer Maria Rilke

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god. —Jorge Luis Borges

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man. —Leon Trotsky

Dirda even occasionally pens a few bon mots of his own, such as:

In digressions lie lessons.

and

What children behold, they become.

Dirda’s most recent book is Classics for Pleasure, a collection of personal takes on some well-known and undeservedly obscure great books. Dirda would no doubt agree with Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s aphorism:

He who reads only the classics is sure to remain up to date.

This New Yorker cartoon, by William Haefelli from the May 21, 2001 issue, always strikes home for me, quite literally, since the same number of parents and children sit around our dinner table every evening.

I never regale my kids with aphorisms, of course, unless they ask … which, for some reason, they never do. And on the odd occasion when aphorisms are discussed, they rarely ask for second helpings…

This cartoon, also from The New Yorker (by George Price from the September 7, 1963 issue), is a sobering commentary on the power of aphorisms to cut right through even the most profound intoxications to present undiluted reality…

Speaking of Serbian aphorists … Ninus Nestorovic, a journalist, satirist customs officer and ex-professional footballer who lives in Novi Sad, has so far published four books of aphorisms as well as an anthology of aphorisms from Novi Sad,Pecat vremena. Like his fellow Serbs, Nestorovic takes a darkly satirical view of the state of his nation. Fortunately, the fatalistic political philosophy is leavened by some equally dark humor. Nestorovic delivers his aphorisms from on high, since he is over 2 meters tall … (The translations into English are by Dijana Zdravkovic, with some editing by me.)

At the very edge of the abyss, I realized someone was pushing me.

Since I died, I have increasingly come to resemble my dead father.

Thank the sound system for the silence you hear.

Why create the oasis in the middle of the desert and not some nicer place!

It is difficult to be paranoid with all those maniacs following you around all the time.

I have to confess that I doubted it at first, but now I am convinced: YouTube really does have a video of absolutely everything, including a clip from a film starring the great Russian aphorist Faina Ranevskaya (see p. 53 in Geary’s Guide). I spotted this clip, of Faina playing the piano and singing with a cigarette dangling from her lips, on Ein Hod, a blog of “rare, medium-rare and well-done books stoneware pottery ein hod village and silly things.” Ein Hod also has a link to a Wikepedia entry on Faina, which I never knew existed and which sports several pictures of the great woman herself. She even made it onto a Russian postage stamp! There is also, I learned, a Wikiquote page dedicated toRanevskaya’s sayings, several of which do not appear in my book, including these zingers:

Success is the only unforgivable sin against your neighbor.

Family can replace everything. So, before starting a family, one should think what’s more important—family or everything.

Harry S. Truman is one of America’s most accomplished aphorists in chief (see pp. 105-106 of Geary’s Guide). He had an unrivaled knack for coining blunt, energetic aphorisms. In 1973, Margaret Truman, the President’s daughter, published a memoir of her father. That book was ghost-written by Thomas Fleming, an author and historian who has penned dozens of novels and histories, specializing in the American Revolution and World Wars I and II. I had the pleasure of meeting Thomas Fleming last week at a book fair and we got to chatting about each other’s books, as authors are wont to do at book fairs. When I told him I wrote about aphorisms, he told me the story of interviewing President Truman for Margaret’s memoir. Fleming spent a couple of weeks with the 33rd President, who died in 1972, as part of his research for the book. When he asked the President about the pressures of presidential decision-making, Truman shot back with an aphorism that, according to Fleming, has never before been published. So here it is, with acknowledgment and appreciation to Mr. Thomas Fleming, Harry S. Truman’s undiscovered aphorism:

Any six-year-old’s hindsight is worth a President’s foresight.