Aphorisms

In primary school, my favorite scientific experiment was the one in which we were asked to fill a glass of water at home, sprinkle a hefty helping of salt into it, place an ordinary piece of string in the mixture, then leave it overnight. Once all the water evaporated, you were left with a clutch of salt crystals clinging to the string at all kinds of improbable angles. That’s what San Francisco looks like from the pier of the Sausalito ferry: a jumble of white buildings clustered around the thinnest of peninsulas. The prominence of Coit Tower and the TransAmerica building with its sharp pinnacle gives to the whole an oddly crystalline appearance.

San Francisco is unusual, and unusually beautiful, because there are so many vantage points within it from which to see the whole city in panorama. The pier of the Sausalito ferry is just one. The Golden Gate Bridge is another. And Tank Hill is still another, one I had never experienced before despite having lived not far from it for several years. The view from Tank Hill is simply amazing. It’s also amazing that it’s a natural feature. If you’re actually in a city, most aerial views of that city are provided from the tops of tall buildings. In San Francisco, the geography itself is always offering fresh, lofty perspectives. Wherever you are—Nob Hill, the Haight-Ashbury, the Mission—you can find some grassy knoll from which to view the city at a distance while still being right in the middle of it. You get the long view and up close and personal simultaneously. Higher planes, elevated states are always within easy walking distance. You can lift your head into wide open spaces—so high and so wide open that it’s dizzying—while keeping your feet firmly on the ground. Kind of reminds me of Michel de Montaigne’s bracing observation:

Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.

I saw a billboard the other day with a big picture of Theirry Henry, the French football star, on it. He loomed over the street, arms crossed. He looked cool, aloof, determined. Next to his face were the words: I hate to lose but I am not afraid to fail. I did not notice what Henry was advertising, probably sneakers or mobile phones or credit cards or something. Yes, success comes from welcoming your failures, and your failings. Winners are no better or worse than anybody else, just a lot more persistent. Indeed, it is often defeat that provides the energy for their amazing perseverance. Josh Billings, a 19th century American humorist, was getting at something like this when he wrote:

Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there.

And there is another way we are similar to postage stamps: We only recognize our real worth after we’ve been licked.

At a recent appearance at the Falmouth Festival of Literature and Arts, I was asked how you go about writing aphorisms. So I explained the two aphoristic writing methods I had observed: the spontaneous combustion method (inspired impromptu aphorisms scribbled on napkins, receipts or anything else that’s handy, as practiced by aphorists like Stanislaw Jerzy Lec) and the formal composition method (whittling down a much longer piece into one sparkling sentence, as practiced by aphorists like Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld). All the aphorists I have encountered seem to practice one form or the other. But then the woman who asked the question said that she was actually asking how you (i.e. me) write aphorisms. I was a bit surprised by the question since, though I still consider myself an aspiring aphorist, I’ve spent most of my time recently writing about aphorisms rather than writing the aphorisms myself. But yesterday I had a moment of spontaneous combustion and realized a few things about the practice of aphorism composition that might suggest the beginnings of an answer to her question.

I was out running on Hampstead Heath. It was a crisp, early autumn afternoon. The trees were turning orange, the leaves already on the ground puckering up like skin that’s been too long in the bath. The sun was slung low on the horizon. I was running past a group of about five people, all standing in a row next to one another, their hands raised to their brows and squinting into the sun. As I jogged past, the following line came to me:

People tend to salute anything that is unnaturally bright, at least until the shade from their hands reveals what it really is.

As aphorisms go, this isn’t great. It’s a bit flabby, a bit too verbose, but it will serve for the purposes of this anatomy. This was a classic case of spontaneous combustion. The line came to me whole and complete. Apart from tinkering a bit with “shows what it really is” versus “reveals what it really is”, I didn’t revise or edit the sentence at all. (I went with “reveals” because of the internal rhyme with “really”.) I looked at those people and the line appeared. That was it. So the first step in the process of composition was observation: seeing something in the world that I could use as an image. Running past those five people all strung out in a line with their hands to their brows reminded me instantly of a group of soldiers standing at attention, saluting as some officer struts past. It seemed to me a really comical sight. I knew, of course, that they were just shielding their eyes against the low-slung sun to see what was going on in the park, but the military image stuck with me. And that led to the second step in the process: making the link between the image and the moral, psychological or philosophical “lesson” aphorisms contain.

So the second stage of composition involved using the image of those people as a metaphor for some other observation; in this case, a sort of psychological comment on how people tend to react to authority figures. When you’re squinting into the sun, objects can appear larger, more luminous, more impressive than they really are. I remember driving through central Spain years ago and seeing what appeared to be enormous black bulls in the distance. Through the heat waves rising from the highway, these huge silhouettes seemed magnificent and menacing. When we got closer, though, and the glare was gone, they turned out to be just raggedy old billboards in the shape of bulls advertising some kind of Spanish beer or something. The same thing often happens with famous people and authority figures: the spotlights that come with their positions make them seem intensely bright and larger than life. But when you see them in ordinary illumination, shorn of spotlights, they turn out to be far less impressive. So the second stage in the process was: making the metaphor that gives the aphorism its psychological point.

Again, I’m not making any grandiose claims about my little aphorism. It is what it is, a shard of reflected light from a brief moment of observation and inspiration. But it seems to me that this must be what happens when aphorisms are composed. Even those who practice the formal composition method must start with some sudden revelation or insight. And it’s amazing how immediately that observation becomes entwined with language. You see some image in the world and less than a nanosecond later your brain has processed it into some clever little sentence. The observation and the insight seem to arrive together, inextricably linked in the mind. For the aphorist, I think, seeing something and saying something are the same thing.

My eldest son was born just three hours before my own birthday. That was 12 years ago. Every time our birthdays roll around, he always becomes a bit contrite and kind of half-apologizes for screwing up my own big day. He thinks I might think that my birthday has become somewhat anti-climactic since he arrived on the scene just the day before. He’s right, of course. I’m much more excited about his birthday nowadays than my own, and certainly feel his birthday is something to celebrate, while mine is something to be, well, more or less endured. But I also always tell him that he was the best birthday present I ever got. And it’s true. Though the pair of Arcopedico slippers I got this year are pretty nice, too…

Birthdays are strange days. They were very important to me as a kid; in some ways, even more exciting than Christmas. Then for a time I didn’t take much interest in them. I was too young to regard them as important milestones and too old to get too worked up about them as events in themselves. It was not until I had kids myself that my interest in birthdays revived. It’s fun to arrange parties for your kids, and even more fun to see how much fun they have. This renewed engagement with birthdays happens to coincide with my entering that phase of middle age when the first signs that I am starting to get ‘old’ are appearing. One recent sign, both amusing and faintly perplexing, occured when my 12-year-old son (the same one who gatecrashed my birthday) called me on Saturday afternoon after his drama class to say that he would be home late because he was hanging out with a bunch of his friends. Wow, I thought, now I’m the father of a child who’s old enough to call me to say he’ll be late. What a concept.

This is a strange feeling because I don’t feel like I’ve aged enough to be the father of a 12-year-old. Gertrude Stein said it best when she wrote:

We are always the same age inside.

It’s true. No matter how much my hair grays and thins, no matter how many of my own birthdays roll around,
I don’t feel like I’ve grown any older inside. Wiser, yes. (Well, at least, I hope so.) More mature, certainly. Jaded, no, but definitely cynical. Yet not a day older than 24 or so, inside. I can see my kids transforming before my very eyes—growing from toddlers into little boys and girls and now pre-pubescents who telephone me to say they will be late. Despite all the evidence of change around me, though, I seem to observe it all from a steady interior age.

Why is that? Is it some sort of denial? I’m really getting old and decrepit and just don’t want to face it. Or is it some kind of illusion? The chronological equivalent of sitting in a moving train and feeling like it’s the landscape that’s flying past, not you. Or is that trite old saying true? You’re as young as you feel. I know what I’d like for my next birthday… More of the same.

It sounds like the latest self-help manual, but this is actually the title of an essay by the 19th century German author Ludwig Borne. Among his many claims to fame, these two are perhaps the most unexpected: He was an important influence on Sigmund Freud, and the town of Boerne, Texas (pop. 6,019) is named after him. The former accomplishment has to do with the literary essay ‘The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days,’ in which he advised: ‘Take a few sheets of paper and for three days on end write down, without fabrication or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your head. Write down what you think of yourself, of your wife, of the Turkish War, of Goethe … and when three days have passed you will be quite out of your senses with astonishment at the new and unheard-of thoughts you have had. This is the art of becoming an original writer in three days.” This essay helped Freud develop his ideas about free association. The latter honor is due to the fact that Boerne, Texas was founded by German immigrants who admired Börne’s liberal political views.

Born in Frankfurt as Lob Baruch, the son of a successful Jewish banker, Börne changed his name in 1818 when he became a Lutheran. He briefly had a job as a civil servant, but after the fall of Napoleon Jews were no longer permitted to hold public appointments. So Börne became a journalist, editing a series of newspapers, including Die Wage, which was known for its lively, satirical political columns. The paper was perhaps a little too lively for the local authorities; the police shut it down in 1821. Börne went to live in Paris, where he wrote Briefe aus Paris, which criticized German despotism and espoused the rights of the individual.

Börne’s aphorisms are deeply sarcastic and satirical. He’s particularly scathing about politicians:

Ministers fall like buttered slices of bread: usually on their good side.

But he has some equally dark musings on human nature in general:

History teaches us virtue, but nature never ceases to teach us vice.

I can never decide whether to take Börne’s advice in ‘The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days’ seriously. Did he really mean it? Or was he simply poking fun at writers who thought they could produce great works with little effort? Freud clearly took the essay seriously, and incorporated free association as a key feature of psychoanalysis. But still I wonder if Börne wasn’t just up to his old satiric tricks.

In some ways, bloggers have taken Börne’s advice. Some of the most original blogs are simply the unrestrained streams of consciousness of people who have the time and determination to write down everything that occurs to them about themselves, their spouses, the Iraq war, Jessica Simpson, etc… And you certainly could become quite out of your senses reading all that stuff. The trick is, I think, to stick with it for three days. If you can really persist in writing every thought that pops into your head for that long, you might really get somewhere. By the time three days have passed, you will have flushed out all the flotsam and jetsam in your mind—and then you will either dry up or little flakes of gold will start glistening in the riverbed. I saw a program on television once about a mentally ill man who kept a diary of every minute of every day. He did nothing else but write every waking moment of his life. There were no events to record, since all he did was scribble away in his journal all day. What a torrent he must have had cascading through his skull. Seems a little too much for me, though. But three days, I think I could manage that—one long lost weekend of non-stop, utterly original writing. But the big question is: Are the effects permanent?

It sounds like the latest self-help manual, but this is actually the title of an essay by the 19th century German author Ludwig Borne. Among his many claims to fame, these two are perhaps the most unexpected: He was an important influence on Sigmund Freud, and the town of Boerne, Texas (pop. 6,019) is named after him. The former accomplishment has to do with the literary essay‘The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days,’ in which he advised: ‘Take a few sheets of paper and for three days on end write down, without fabrication or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your head. Write down what you think of yourself, of your wife, of the Turkish War, of Goethe … and when three days have passed you will be quite out of your senses with astonishment at the new and unheard-of thoughts you have had. This is the art of becoming an original writer in three days.” This essay helped Freud develop his ideas about free association. The latter honor is due to the fact that Boerne, Texas was founded by German immigrants who admired Börne’s liberal political views.

Born in Frankfurt as Lob Baruch, the son of a successful Jewish banker, Börne changed his name in 1818 when he became a Lutheran. He briefly had a job as a civil servant, but after the fall of Napoleon Jews were no longer permitted to hold public appointments. So Börne became a journalist, editing a series of newspapers, including Die Wage, which was known for its lively, satirical political columns. The paper was perhaps a little too lively for the local authorities; the police shut it down in 1821. Börne went to live in Paris, where he wrote Briefe aus Paris, which criticized German despotism and espoused the rights of the individual.

Börne’s aphorisms are deeply sarcastic and satirical. He’s particularly scathing about politicians:

Ministers fall like buttered slices of bread: usually on their good side.

But he has some equally dark musings on human nature in general:

History teaches us virtue, but nature never ceases to teach us vice.

I can never decide whether to take Börne’s advice in ‘The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days’ seriously. Did he really mean it? Or was he simply poking fun at writers who thought they could produce great works with little effort? Freud clearly took the essay seriously, and incorporated free association as a key feature of psychoanalysis. But still I wonder if Börne wasn’t just up to his old satiric tricks.

In some ways, bloggers have taken Börne’s advice. Some of the most original blogs are simply the unrestrained streams of consciousness of people who have the time and determination to write down everything that occurs to them about themselves, their spouses, the Iraq war, Jessica Simpson, etc… And you certainly could become quite out of your senses reading all that stuff. The trick is, I think, to stick with it for three days. If you can really persist in writing every thought that pops into your head for that long, you might really get somewhere. By the time three days have passed, you will have flushed out all the flotsam and jetsam in your mind—and then you will either dry up or little flakes of gold will start glistening in the riverbed. I saw a program on television once about a mentally ill man who kept a diary of every minute of every day. He did nothing else but write every waking moment of his life. There were no events to record, since all he did was scribble away in his journal all day. What a torrent he must have had cascading through his skull. Seems a little too much for me, though. But three days, I think I could manage that—one long lost weekend of non-stop, utterly original writing. But the big question is: Are the effects permanent?

Alfonso Sicilia Sobrino, a Spanish artist, recently gave us one of his prints, a thank-you gift for putting him up in our spare room for a couple of nights. (You can see some of Alfonso’s work by going to the Esfera del Arte website and clicking on his name in the ‘Our Artists’ section.) It was a very generous gesture, and one that we gratefully accepted. My wife and I both really liked the vivacity and cheerfulness of the piece, which we hung in the living room in a spot that used to be occupied by a clutch of black-and-white drawings. The print brightened up that whole corner of the room. But even as our recent acquisition cast the living room in an entirely new light, it occasioned other, somewhat darker thoughts.

The black outlines of dust on the wall where the old frames hung were now clearly visible, like the chalk lines around the body at a murder scene. We’d have to paint those, I thought. And that section of wall near the corner where the water damage was, we’d have to do something about that, too. It looked too much like that part of the room had some kind of strange skin disease. And that gash in the ceiling where the plaster fell down years ago; why the hell haven’t we fixed that yet? And I’m sick and tired of constantly stumbling over the lip of the stair where the carpet is worn away. It’s beyond carpet cleaning. Let’s get new carpets for the whole stairway while we’re at it. Yes, before my enthusiasm for the print had even cooled, I had succumbed to the dreaded Diderot effect.

The Diderot effect is named after the 18th–century French writer Denis Diderot, who spent 25 years editing the massive Encyclopédie, one of the founding documents of the Enlightenment. Diderot is also the author of a charming essay called Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown, in which he describes how the gift of a beautiful scarlet dressing gown plunges him into debt and turns his life upside down. Initially pleased with the unexpected gift, Diderot describes how he soon came to rue his new garment. Compared to his elegant dressing gown, the rest of his possessions began to seem tawdry. His old straw chair, for example, just wouldn’t do. So he replaced it with an armchair covered in Moroccan leather. And the rickety old desk that groaned under his papers; that was out, too, and in came an expensive new writing table. Even the beloved prints that hung on his walls had to make way for newer, more costly prints. “I was absolute master of my old dressing gown,” Diderot writes, “but I have become a slave to my new one … Beware of the contamination of sudden wealth. The poor man may take his ease without thinking of appearances, but the rich man is always under a strain.”

Consumer researchers call this kind of trading up “the Diderot effect.” But Diderot was also a marvellous aphorist and it is he who is responsible for coining that classic French phrase l’esprit de l’escalier: ‘the spirit of the staircase,’ that moment of belated inspiration when you think of the perfect comeback for a difficult encounter only when you’re walking down the stairs after the conversation is over. That’s another Diderot effect I observe too often in myself.

Diderot, though, didn’t suffer much from l’esprit de l’escalier. He was famed as a brilliant conversationalist, and seems to have devised his bon mots while coming up the stairs rather than going down them. During the 25 years or so he spent editing the 28 volumes of his Encyclopédie, he also wrote hundreds of entries on a bewildering array of topics in agriculture, industry and science. His aphorisms all promoted freedom of thought, religious tolerance and the importance of scientific inquiry:

From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.

The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.

In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.

Diderot is a classic Enlightenment figure: the optimistic skeptic. He doubted pretty much all the received wisdom of his own time but, like Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, he was sure that something better would turn up thanks to human inventiveness and ingenuity. Mr. Micawber was also seemingly immune to l’esprit de l’escalier and like Diderot had some insightful things to say about economics. Mr. Micawber’s equation for financial happiness, for example, really can’t be rivalled:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

It’s frustrating, if not exactly misery-inducing, not to be able to afford the home improvements our new print seems to deserve. And I’ve been trying to come up with reasons why the Diderot effect should not apply to me, but so far without success. I’m sure I’ll think of something while I’m walking down the stairs…