Aphorisms

A memory is an intricate, ever-shifting net of firing neurons and crackling synapses. Memory is not some vast cerebral warehouse filled with rows and rows of neatly ordered filing cabinets. It is more like a maze, the twistings and turnings of which rearrange themselves completely each time we step into the past. Not facts but fabrications, memories are perpetually remade and replaced as new experiences shift the skein of synaptic connections in our brains. When we recall, the neural pattern corresponding to the memory flashes through our skulls as quickly and as clearly as a lighting bolt. And like lightning, it is as swiftly gone. Nothing is more fickle, inconstant, flickering. Nothing is as true. “The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet,” British poet Edward Thomas wrote. That’s because every time we recollect the past we re-ignite it, and bring it back to life.

This abbreviated essay originally appeared in the April issue of Ode, on sale now.

Not long ago, I was walking along Essex Road in Islington when I spotted a billboard with a big picture of Thierry Henry on it. He loomed over the street, arms crossed—cool, aloof, determined. I don’t remember now what Henry was hawking, probably sneakers or mobile phones or credit cards or something. What I do remember are the words emblazoned next to his face:

I hate to lose but I’m not afraid to fail.

As an advertisement, I suppose that billboard was a failure because I haven’t the faintest idea what Henry was selling. But as an aphorism—a short, smart, witty, philosophical saying—it was a huge success. That phrase has stuck in my mind ever since, an edgier version of the more old-fashioned maxim ‘It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game.’

You don’t hear the word ‘aphorism’ much these days but, as the Henry billboard shows, aphorisms are all around us. The aphorism is the oldest written art form on the planet. The Egyptians and the Chinese were at it more than five thousand years ago; the ancient Greek philosophers and Old Testament authors were also early practitioners. Buddha (“We are what we think”), Jesus (“If a blind person leads a blind person both of them will fall into a ditch”), and Muhammad (“Trust in Allah, but tether your camel first”) all did it—and we still do it, too.

Everyone has a favourite aphorism, whether it’s a refrain from a pop song, a passage from a novel, or something a friend or relative used to say. An elderly gentleman came up to me at a literary festival, jabbed his forefinger into my chest, and recited a line his grandmother always used in times of stress:

Keep your mind and your bowels open and you’ll be all right.

A woman, struggling with the competing demands of motherhood and career, shared a saying she found comforting and inspiring:

If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.

On a train headed out of London, I saw a teenager swaying down the aisle towards me. He had shoulder length hair, his face riveted by lines of studs and piercings. On his t-shirt, this proud declaration:

A weekend wasted is not a wasted weekend.

These are all aphorisms, pithy, simple sentences that deliver the short sharp shock of an old forgotten truth. We all need words of wisdom to live by, little sacred scriptures we carry around inside our heads. And it is this aphoristic instinct that motivates us to carve inscriptions onto monuments and tombstones, scrawl graffiti on the sides of buildings, and plaster bumper stickers on the tailgates of our cars. It’s the reason I’ve been obsessed by aphorisms since I was eight years old, and why I’ve organized a symposium on the subject under the auspices of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London.

The symposium—The World in a Phrase: Philosophy and the Aphorism—will explore why, despite their antiquity, aphorisms remain the thinking and writing style best suited to our times. Poets, professors, philosophers, psychologists and comedians (all of them aphorists) from Europe and the United States will gather to discuss the aphorism as a bright, incisive way of grappling with the big questions of life—and to celebrate the form as just the thing if you hate ideologies but love ideas.

Why aphorisms? Because they cut the crap. They are cynical and acerbic, an antidote to the bland, relentlessly upbeat nostrums in self-help guides and inspirational literature. It’s not enough to just read one and murmur sagely to yourself, ‘How true, how true.’ Aphorisms make you want to do something. In our age of drive-thru culture, soporific sound bites and manufactured sentiment, they retain the power to instigate and inspire, enlighten and enrage, entertain and edify.

Aphorisms are literature’s hand luggage. They fit easily into the overhead compartment of your brain and contain everything you need to get through a rough day at the office or a dark night of the soul.

For John Lloyd, producer of television comedies like Not the Nine O’clock News, Spitting Image, Blackadder and QI, aphorisms are as valid and as useful statements about existence as mathematics or physics. “Like aphorisms,” he says, “key equations—e = mc2, for example—are super-pared down but immensely complex. They are the shortest possible expressions of interesting ideas.”

Lloyd also sees parallels between aphorisms and jokes, and will give a talk on that topic at the symposium. “If you’re miserable, the best thing to do is to have a laugh,” he says. “There is always something positive about the wisdom in aphorisms; jokes are not always that optimistic.” Lloyd cites a favourite line from American comedian Phyllis Diller:

We spend the first twelve months of our children’s lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve years telling them to sit down and shut up.

Don Paterson, twice winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, was “infected” by aphorisms after reading Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as a teenager. He started taking an active interest after coming across the work E.M. Cioran, the Romania-born author of such charming, light-hearted sayings as:

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live—moreover, the only one.

“Aphorisms have to be wholly inspired,” says Paterson, who will attempt to come up with a working definition of the aphorism in his symposium talk. “If they are willed, they don’t work. If they don’t strike you as immediately and incontrovertibly the case, then who needs them? Aphorisms are a subversive form, and our times require subversion.”

It’s fitting that the symposium, the first of its kind with such an international scope, is held in London. A walk around the city is a miniature aphoristic history tour. Visit Samuel Johnson’s house on Gough Square near Fleet Street for the feel of the cafes and drinking establishments where the good doctor spouted lines like this:

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

A stroll through Soho will take you past some of the rooms where William Blake held séances, during which he executed quick sketches of the historical personages who came to visit (King Herod, Michelangelo, Socrates) and where he penned aphoristic verse like this:

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

Or make the pilgrimage to St. Michael’s Church in Highgate, where Samuel Taylor Coleridge is buried, just across the road from the house on The Grove where he made aphoristic quips like:

Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.

And the city is still cranking out aphorists, like Les Coleman, an artist and author who lives in south London:

Puppets go to sleep the moment they break free from their strings.

My favourite London aphorist is Logan Pearsall Smith. An American, Smith lived almost his entire adult life in London, where he became a well-known essayist and critic and, in 1947, published the anthology, A Treasury of English Aphorisms. Smith is best remembered for the saying:

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

As much as I admire Smith, I can’t help but disagree with his aphorism. For me, literature is life, and aphorisms are literature/life distilled down to its very essence. The platitudes of politicians, the slogans of corporate salesmen, the bromides inside greeting cards—they’re all just Alka-Seltzer for the soul. They have a brief fizz, and may provide temporary relief from existential indigestion, but only aphorisms tell it like it really is.

A shorter version of this article originally appeared in Time Out London.

I perform my ‘juggling aphorisms’ show—real live juggling, with words and balls—on Thursday, March 13 at 6:30 p.m. at Waterstones on Gower Street.

The aphorism symposium takes place on Friday, March 14 in the Great Hall of London House at Goodenough College, Mecklenburgh Square. For information and tickets, go to the Institute of Philosophy website.

Welles Reymond published a little book called Words & Feelings, Chuckles & Tears. It is a little book; the format is slightly smaller than your average credit card. The aphorisms in the book are almost all about romantic love, a subject most aphorists find difficult to address in other than cynical or suspicious terms. Reymond’s tone is often melancholic, even rueful. There is a sense of ‘if I knew then what I know now…’ throughout, as evidenced by the very last aphorism in the book:

I wish I had read these epigrams before I had to write them.

Still, the bitter wisdom of the book is leavened by regular eruptions of humor, the chuckles alluded to in the title. A selection of Reymond’s other sayings:

Slings and arrows are boomerangs.

When you worry about whether it’s over or not, it is.

Looking back at love lost is like turning your back on a sunrise.

“Legend has it that Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in only six words. His response? ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ Last year, SMITH Magazine re-ignited the recountre by asking our readers for their own six-word memoirs. They sent in short life stories in droves, from the bittersweet (’Cursed with cancer, blessed with friends’) and poignant (’I still make coffee for two’) to the inspirational (’Business school? Bah! Pop music? Hurrah’) and hilarious (’I like big butts, can’t lie’).”

This is the introduction to the Six-Word Memoirs section of Smith, an online magazine designed “to be a place for storytelling, with a focus on personal narrative.” These six-word memoirs make fascinating and compulsive reading. Smith does not refer to the pieces as aphorisms, but the most moving and insightful of them are indeed aphorisms. They are great examples of the ability of the aphorism to compact so much—an entire life even—into so few words. The six-word memoirs are the bonsai trees of autobiographical writing: constrained by their miniature containers, these reflections are all the more powerful for forcing all of their blossoms into such a tiny space. Reading them, you get a very clear and poignant sense of the life behind the writing, sometimes funny, sometimes bitter, sometimes tragic. I’ll say no more. Read for yourself:

Bad beginning makes ending look good.

A smile can change a life…

Never underestimate the power of snuggling.

Born, published, now out of print.

Life-reflected in my sons’ eyes.

Not worth even six words.

Samuel Arthur Bent was an author, lawyer and editor of a delightful anthology of quotations called Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men. First published in 1882, the book is arranged alphabetically by writer and is absolutely crammed with aphorisms, anecdotes and biographical tidbits. Bent even includes parallel lines, in which he lists similar sayings by other “great men.” Bent’s selections and editorial remarks can seem stodgy to the 21st century reader, but his brilliance, erudition and eccentricity are evident throughout. And despite the sexism of the title, Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men features plenty of female aphorists, such as Madame du Deffand, an 18th-century French wit, salon hostess, and friend of Voltaire and d’Alembert. Bent recounts the story of one Cardinal de Polignac, who described to Madame du Deffand the martyrdom of Saint Denis at Montmartre and how, after his decapitation, the freshly minted martyr walked all the way to the distant village where a cathedral was built in his name holding his severed head in his hands, whereupon Madame du Deffand replied:

The distance is nothing; it is only the first step that costs.

Bent also tells the story of a certain Sir Hercules who, when asked if he had polished off three bottles of port without assistance, replied: “Not quite: I had the assistance of a bottle of Madeira.” Bent died in 1912, after collapsing in the lobby of a Boston hotel. You can download his obituary from the New YorkTimes. Some sayings via Bent to keep you on the straight and narrow:

Religion converts despair, which destroys, into resignation, which submits. —Lady Blessington

Go on, and the light will come to you. —Jean D’Alembert

Flowers are the sweetest things that God ever made, and forgot to put a soul into. —Henry Ward Beecher

So order your affairs as if you were to live long, or die soon. —Bias

Be old when young, that you may be young when old. —Richard Whately

Tears leave the body at a temperature of 98.6 degrees. It is difficult to experience this from the tear rolling down your own cheek. But stand close to someone who is weeping, let a drop fall onto your arm, your wrist, and you feel the sudden heat immediately. We are, in fact, continually weeping. The eyes are bathed in tears that protect, cleanse, lubricate. Crying anoints the cornea in holy oils, keeps the lens bright, rinses dust from the eyes. This veil of tears is anatomically correct. Tears always appear at the extremes, greasing the joints between pleasure and pain. Unlike grief, tears have extraordinarily short half-lives. No sooner are they shed than they begin to fade, evaporate, to disappear. “Nothing dries sooner than a tear,” Benjamin Franklin once observed. Which is why we all have an endless supply.

This abbreviated essay originally appeared in the March issue of Ode, on sale now.

Anthony W. Shipps wrote a book called The Quote Sleuth, which contains tips on “the tools and methods used in the identification of the sources of quotations” and is really the definitive work for anyone serious about tracking down the correct attributions for all kinds of sayings. The book is an exhaustive how-to guide for tracers of lost quotations, and Shipps includes lots of examples of puzzling quotations and how he managed, with a lot of persistence and ingenuity, to finally pinpoint their original sources. Towards the end of the book, Shipps lists some axioms for would-be quote sleuths that occasionally approach the aphoristic and which I hereby excerpt:

Time spent looking for quotations is never wasted.

The Oxford English Dictionary is a book of quotations.

You should get ready for quotation problems long before they happen.

Solutions that you cannot find sometimes find you.

Vasil Tolevski is from Macedonia, where he has already published an anthology of Montenegran and Serbian aphorisms and is preparing an anthology of Macedonian aphorisms. Like his fellow Balkan aphorists, Tolevski’s sayings are darkly satirical, with a fierce cynicism about politics and politicians. Most of the political disputes in the region involve Balkan nations arguing (or fighting) amongst themselves. Macedonia, however, has an additional squabble with Greece, over who has the right to the name “Macedonia.” Some of Tolevski’s grimly humorous reflections on the state of his nation:

Without people, whips would be useless.

The Devil has gone; even he couldn’t stand this hell.

They promised to pursue justice and they kept their word: They pursued it right out of the country.

The first sign that you have sunk to the bottom is when everyone around you is as silent as fish.

In politics, ecology is observed: Political wastes are always recycled.

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: