Aphorisms

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…

The Finns have their own Aphorism Association as well as a National Aphorism Day (May 23) and annual award for the country’s best aphorist, the Samuli Paronen Prize. The Russians have the Moscow Aphoristic Circle, an organization that meets every Thursday in Moscow’s Central House of Arts Workers, where it holds competitions for composing the best aphorisms on specific topics. The Serbs have the Belgrade Aphoristic Circle, a group of aphorists whose day jobs range from postman to orthodontist to winemaker to air force pilot. Boris Mitic, a Serbian documentary filmmaker, is making a movie about them. And now I’ve learned, thanks to the German translator who has been translating aphorisms for my encyclopedia, that yesterday the Germans launched their second German Aphorism Convention. (This is a link to a news item, in German, on the WDR website . Be sure to listen to the audio clip as well, which contains amusing attempts of men and women on the street to define an aphorism.) I used to doubt whether aphorisms were still a mainstream interest; but after hearing about all these remarkable organizations, I’m not so sure.

The German Aphorism Convention is being held in Hattingen, a town about an hour outside Düsseldorf. There German-speaking aphorists are meeting to discuss scintillating subjects such as “pun and revelation,” exchange new aphorisms and inaugurate something called the German Aphorism Archive. WDR’s website invites users to contribute their own aphorisms, one of which reads:

My conscience is clean—I never use it.

I am, naturally, fascinated by initiatives like this and urge anyone who knows of similar organizations or events anywhere else in the world to please, please drop me a line via the Contacts page or the Aphorism Alert form on my homepage. I will then endeavour to compile this information and add it to the links page as a resource for wandering aphorism aficionados who might want to hook up with their fellows on foreign shores. Meanwhile, to celebrate the second German Aphorism Convention, I offer below some of my favorite aphorisms from German aphorists…

Marie von Ebner–Eschenbach (actually, an Austrian, but still German-speaking):

Think once before you give, twice before you accept, and a thousand times before you ask.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

You never go further than when you no longer know where you are going.

Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmerman:

Let the captious know that the best way to get rid of a quarrel is not always the quickest way of getting out of it.

Ludwig Börne:

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

France is filled with great museums: the Louvre, the Orangerie, the Picasso and Rodin museums, the entire Loire Valley. But for me, none of them quite equals the Egg Museum. Located in the tiny village of Soyans in the haute provence, the Egg Museum was founded in 1989 by Françoise Vignal-Caillet. Over the past 17 years, she’s transformed what began as a personal obsession with decorating eggs into a comprehensive collection of all kinds of eggs from all around the world. She’s got a 70-million-year-old fossilized dinosaur egg (you can find old ammonites and other fossils all around the region without even digging); she’s got an enormous ostrich egg (about the size of an American football) and a tiny hummingbird egg, which is no bigger than the nail of my little finger; she’s got eggs from crocodiles, storks, flamingos, spiders and emus.

Then there are the decorated eggs, which include some truly bizarre creations. She has painted and carved eggs from all around the globe, from Bali to Egypt to Madagascar to Ukraine. There are eggs from Russia with icons painted on them, eggs from the Balkans with Nativity scenes painted on them, eggs by Vignal-Caillet herself with Nativity scenes placed inside them, embroidered eggs, carved eggs, eggs adorned with glass beads, acid-etched eggs with Celtic designs, even a faux Fabergé egg. In fact, the only kind of eggs Vignal-Caillet doesn’t have are scrambled, fried and poached eggs.

My favorite egg is really not an egg at all. It is just the thin inner membrane that separates the shell from the egg proper. It’s the thing you have to peel away with the shell when eating a hard-boiled egg. The one in the Egg Museum was extracted whole from its egg; the shell was peeled away and the yolk removed from inside while leaving the membrane completely intact and egg-shaped. Somehow the artist managed to solidify this membrane and then proceeded to embroider it with a knitting needle. It has hundreds of tiny perforations in it in various patterns, sort of like the lace doilies your grandmother used to place her tea cups on. It’s an amazingly delicate, beautiful and vaguely disturbing thing, almost like a photographic negative of an egg, an egg-shaped empty space, a series of holes connected in the form of an egg. It must have taken forever to make. Amazing the lengths to which people will go for their passions, however obscure.

Of course, there were also eggs with aphorisms written on them, but they were all in French so I couldn’t read them. And there were eggs with poems written on them and extracts from famous documents, including one with a few lines from the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps Vignal-Caillet might consider these aphorisms for some of her new acquisitions:

From Polish-German aphorist Gabriel Laub:

Why shouldn’t the egg feel wiser than the chicken? After all, it knows the chicken’s darkest side.

From English aphorist Samuel Butler:

A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.

And, um, this one’s from me…

There is not much room for error in an eggshell.

The town of Ilkley, a lovely little place on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, has no cinema. It closed down in 1967 or 1968. That’s what one of the organizers of the town’s film society told me. The society was showing a film (well, a DVD anyway) upstairs in the Ilkley Playhouse, the same theater in which I had just given a talk. I was milling about in the lobby after signing some books and got to chatting with the men who were getting ready for the night’s main feature,Capote. The film society shows a new DVD there every two weeks. For many people, it’s more convenient than driving 12 miles to Bradford to see a flick. Another man, a former headmaster, had a unique way of laying out the programs for the evening. He put a stack of A4 sheets of paper on the table, held down one corner of the bottom sheet with his finger, then placed the palm of his other hand on top of the stack and began turning his hand in a clockwise direction. Gradually, elegantly, the sheets blossomed into a perfect fan, like a peacock unfurling its tail. He said he learned the trick at the local fish and chip shop, back when he was a boy and fish and chips cost “tuppence.” I had turned up in town for the Ilkley Literature Festival and was struck by the way I encountered aphorisms at every turn.

First of all, on the train from Leeds, a teenage boy, maybe he was about 17 or 18 years old, walked past me down the aisle. I happened to notice his t-shirt bore a slogan, which read:

A weekend wasted is not a wasted weekend.

Not necessarily a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree, but still an excellent aphorism. Then when I got to the Ilkley Playhouse, someone offered me a cup of tea and some biscuits. I was very keen on the biscuits since I really needed a sugar rush before I was due to go on. In honor of the festival, biscuits come with a complimentary haiku. Now, haiku are normally not aphorisms; they tend to be almost completely imagery and feeling, without the philosophical heft an aphorism requires. But the one I got qualified on both counts, an excellent haiku and pretty strong aphorism, too:

Black spider on your towel!

After that it’s always there

Waiting to be found.

Before I was due to go on, I was pacing up and down in the dressing room. Fortunately, there was a bowl of fruit there and I scarfed down a banana. The biscuits didn’t quite pack the punch I was hoping for. Time always seems to drag in dressing rooms. You can hear the audience entering the theater, hear them chatting and laughing, hear the seats scuffing and screeching across the floor. But the longer I have to wait, the more nervous I become. So I would much rather just get on, since my nerves quickly disappear once I step onstage. Anyway, I kept looking at the clock and it seemed to be going incredibly slowly. Every time I looked at it, it showed ten minutes to six. So I would pace up and down a bit then look again. It still showed ten minutes to six. That can’t be right, I thought. So I got up close, examined it and realized, the clock had stopped at ten minutes to six! The second hand was just stuttering there, stuck in the same position like one of those wind-up toys that hits a wall and just keeps cranking away. Anyway, after the show a guy came up to me and shared a wonderful aphorism his grandmother always used to say:

Keep your mind and your bowels open and you’ll do alright.

Apparently, she never specified if it had to be in that order… The next day I was puttering around in the tourist office, where they also had some local souvenirs for sale. And sure enough, there was a selection of hotplates with traditional Yorkshire proverbs on them. My favorite:

You can always tell a Yorkshireman—but you can’t tell him much.

Even Bettys Tea Rooms, the famed Ilkley eatery, had aphorisms printed on the menu. Bettys was founded at the turn of the century by a young Swiss confectioner, Frederick Belmont. He initially intended to head for the south coast of England. But confused by the bustle of London, and not speaking a word of English, he ended up in Yorkshire. And not having enough money for a return train journey, he remained. His descendants still run the place to this day. One of “Uncle Frederick’s” sayings on the menu reads:

If we want something just right, we have to do it ourselves.

Mr. Belmont was no doubt a better confectioner than aphorist (and Bettys‘ chefs still make a tasty rösti), but the ubiquity of pithy sayings in Yorkshire really got me thinking. There must be something in the pudding…

It happened again: a splash of glass somewhere in the house. It was a loud, strangely metallic sound, like the crash of a wave hurling sunken cutlery against a tin cliff. But we couldn’t locate the noise. Was it upstairs or down? Did it come from the next room or some more obscure corner of the house? It’s an uncanny feeling, when something shatters near you and you can’t even figure out what or where it is.

There is an initial confusion caused by any sudden disaster, however small in scale. For a moment, you’re disoriented. Something out of the ordinary has happened and it takes a while before you recover your balance, look around and start methodically trying to discover what it was. Suddenly, the most trusted, familiar settings seem suspiciously calm. Something just broke with a bang; how can everything seem so undisturbed, so much the same? Maybe that’s the biggest shock of all: your inability to spot the difference after drastic change. Anyway, we finally found out what it was: A painting in the hall had fallen off the wall.

The painting is of three stick-like figures, in poses that could be dance movements or the leisurely leanings of casual conversation. It hung above the light switch in the hall, a heavily trafficked area of our home. The adhesive backing that held the piece of string that held the painting on the nail that held it to the wall had peeled off. When it gave way, the whole thing clattered to the ground. We cleaned up the shattered glass, saved the painting and the frame for later repair. We still haven’t fixed it or hung it back up, though. So every time I walk down the stairs, I see the spot where that painting used to be. The space is now an empty white rectangle in a frame of light black dust. When you keep one thing in the same place for a long time, it cannot fail to leave an impression—even if the thing itself goes long unnoticed. That is true of this painting. I had seen it so often that I stopped seeing it. When I picked it up off the floor, being careful not to step on any glass, I had a good, long, fresh look at it. I still liked it. Its downfall was sudden, but the adhesive backing must have been coming apart for a long time. Hidden from view, the very thing that held picture and frame together was slowly coming unglued. With the painting on the floor, the wall seemed unnaturally white, painfully bright. Remove a painting from the wall and you see the wall for the first time; take away something you take for granted and you see the blank space it leaves behind.

Proverbs are not aphorisms. Or maybe I should call them fossilized aphorisms, since the only one of Geary’s Five Laws of the Aphorism that proverbs do not obey is: It Must Be Personal. Proverbs were personal when they were first coined, but that was so long ago that the identity of the author has long since worn away through constant use. Proverbs can petrify into cliche over time, but the best of them still glimmer with a shine that comes from the continual polishing they receive rolling off so many tongues. Since proverbs are not aphorisms they fall outside the scope of my present research and writing, but I still encounter them everywhere. Among the many great pleasures of working on my encyclopedia of aphorists is all the old anthologies of proverbs I dig up.

The Book of Merry Riddles is a delightful late medieval anthology. Published in 1660, it was written as an entertainment, something to do with friends and family around the fireplace on a long winter’s night. The book consists of a series of slightly goofy riddles, the answer to each of which is some proverb. Then there is The New England Primer, a mix of catechism and textbook that was compiled by the early English settlers in America. It contains an amazing illustrated alphabet in which each letter is used to launch a rhymed proverbial couplet. The New England Primer also contains this touching dedication:

I leave you here a little booke
For you to looke upon,
That you may see your father’s face
When I am dead and gon.

My favorite proverb collection is George Herbert’s Jacula Prudentum(Outlandish Proverbs). Herbert was one of the great English metaphysical poets as well as an accomplished proverb connoisseur. His anthology is a refreshing read because he juxtaposes serious, spiritual sayings with funny, cynical ones. One that has been stuck in my head since I first read it weeks ago is:

When you finish the house, leave it.

It’s also fascinating to read proverbs from other nations and cultures, since a country’s character can be seen nowhere more clearly than in the sayings it chooses to keep in circulation. Here is a selection of proverbs from Arabic and Chinese:

Arabic Proverbs

I shall not kiss a hand that deserves to be cut off.

A peacemaker receives two-thirds of the blows.

What you write is the truest thing that can be said of you.

A book is a garden carried in the pocket.

He who receives the strokes is not like he who counts them.

The day on which a journey is begun half the journey is done.

You are not learned except that you can carry it about you, and produce it at will.

Chinese Proverbs

Deviate an inch, lose a thousand miles.

Better go than send.

Falling hurts least those who fly low.

Better to do a kindness near at home than to go far to burn incense.

Think twice—and say nothing.

It is a little thing to starve to death; it is a serious matter to lose one’s virtue.

I am up to my eyeballs in aphorisms. As part of the research for my next book, an encyclopedia of world aphorists that’s due out in November of 2007, I am going through every title in the British Library (every title, that is, that’s in a language I can read) that comes up under the keyword ‘aphorisms’. (For the ones that are in languages I can’t read, I get a native speaker to read them…) I get to the library early, which is a very ethereal experience. The angelic, orchestral ping and then the rush of all those laptops launching at the same time must be exactly what it sounds like to ascend into heaven. I’ve had some wonderful revelations amid the stacks of books that have risen and fallen on my desk like so many ancient civilizations; obscure and/or long-dead authors whom I would never have come across any other way. But I’ve also made another discovery: a new category of aphorist, those who have coined only a single truly great (or awful, as the case may be) aphorism. Most aphorists have pretty strong back catalogues: dozens, scores or even hundreds of consistently brilliant and insightful sayings. But there is another group who have just managed to compose the one really majestic maxim. They are the aphoristic equivalents of those benighted bands that have just the one huge hit before disappearing forever from the pop firmament. There is a subset to this group: those aphorists who managed to come up with expressions so excruciating that they too become, in their own way, classics. I present a selection here, which varies wildly from the sublime to the ridiculous . . .

I never knew, for example, that ‘beauty is skin deep’ comes from a poem by Thomas Overbury:

All the carnal beauty of my wife,
Is but skin deep.

Incidentally, this is an excellent example of an aphorism that is evolving into a proverb. The main difference between the two types of sayings is this: people still know who first said or wrote an aphorism. Once no one on the planet any longer knows that Thomas Overbury composed these lines, ‘beauty is skin deep’ will become officially proverbial.

Then there are the classic political sayings by authors who never again said or wrote anything so memorable:

Every country has the government it deserves.
— Joseph de Maistre

Property is theft.
— Pierre Joseph Proudhon

And these scatterings for your aphoristic amusement:

A parent’s food is made sweeter than nectar when his child has toyed with it, dipping his little fingers.
— Valluvar

Reading is thinking with a strange head instead of one’s own.
— I didn’t make a note of the author…

One moment in this world is more precious than a thousand years in the next.
— Nuri, cited in Farid al bin Attar

Aphorisms are chewing gum for the brains.
— Russian, or possibly Lithuanian, author whose name I did not write down…

A real choice is an amputation of which the wound is always open.
— Siegfried E. van Praag

We cannot leave a thought and find it in the same place.
— William King

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
— Don Marquis

And my current personal favorites, both by R. Paul:

Kiss is the fusion of the brims of the upper crunching spasmodic cavities of two different sexes, governed by the law of attraction and love.

Kiss is a peep into the heart through the mouth.

I love London. It’s such a stunningly beautiful city, a fact I was reminded of the other evening while sitting on top of Primrose Hill at sunset. It was my wife’s birthday and we had eaten dinner at Trojka, a Russian restaurant nearby, and then walked up to the top of the hill in the cool, late dusk. From the top ofPrimrose Hill, you have a panoramic view of the city. It can be alarming at first, because right in front of your nose is that hideous spark plug of a building, the BT Tower. But further east, you can see the London Eye, the Gherkin, the majestic dome of St. Paul’s, a bit closer is the new Arsenal stadium, and further east is Canary Wharf. If you look very closely, you can see the tiered steeple ofSt. Bride’s Church, which is where whoever got the idea for the layered wedding cake got the idea for the layered wedding cake. The beauty of this scene was enhanced by the regular appearance of a rubber chicken, which made a brief arc across my line of vision before disappearing again.

It was a guy walking his dog. He was crouched on the grass, just over the lip of the hill so that I couldn’t see him or his dog from where I was sitting. But he was playing a game of fetch with his dog, and every time he tossed that rubber chicken into the air it rose briefly into view before disappearing below the horizon line. I only had a glimpse of it each time; chickens really can’t fly that far. But it truly was a thing of beauty, that gangly, pimply, yellow, featherless projectile. I followed its brief flight eagerly, then turned my attention back to the lovely view. And the lampposts. The lampposts on Primrose Hill are some of the loveliest lampposts I’ve ever seen. Especially when you’re walking uphill and there’s no one at the top, and all you can see at the summit are the silhouettes of those elegant London lampposts etched against the pink-streaked sky. I love London.

London always reminds me of a brain. It is similarly convoluted and circuitous. A lot of cities, especially American ones like New York and Chicago, are laid out in straight lines. Like the circuits on computer chips, there are a lot of right angles in cities like this. But London is a glorious mess. It evolved from a score or so of distinct villages, that merged and meshed as their boundaries enlarged. As a result, London is a labyrinth, full of turnings and twistings just like a brain. Its intelligence is distributed, too, like a brain’s. Each of these little villages—Primrose Hill, Highgate, Clapham, the City—has its own specializations and expertise. They are self-sufficient, even as they are inextricably and essentially part of the whole metropolis. It’s easy to get lost in London, something that probably has as much to do with my poor sense of direction as with the intricacies of the urban layout. Because it’s like a brain, London has loads of folds and crevasses that you’re always falling into unexpectedly. Until last week, I never knew there was a deer park in the western part of Hampstead Heath. And I never would have found it if I hadn’t gotten briefly lost while out for a run on the Heath. London is so rich, so twisted, it always has something new to show you. There’s always something you didn’t know about it. Samuel Johnson, who lived across the street from St. Bride’s Church off Fleet Street, was certainly right when he wrote his famous aphorism about London:

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.

But I also like what Henry James, an American who lived in and loved the city, had to say about the place, even though it doesn’t really qualify as an aphorism:

It is difficult to speak adequately, or justly, of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.

It’s incredibly hot. Every window in the house is open, in the hope of conducting any passing breeze through some steaming corridor or room. One of these gentle breezes knocked over a framed drawing by my daughter, propped on a shelf in my study. I was on the stairs when it happened. Thought I heard someone drop a handful of cutlery. Couldn’t find the source of the noise, though. Not in the kitchen. Not in the bathroom. Then noticed the frame face down on the floor of my study, some shards of glass poking out from underneath it like splayed cartoon limbs from under a boulder. I picked up the frame and drawing, shooed my curious daughter away from the glass, and swept it up. Like an idiot, I continued to walk around in bare feet. It’s so damn hot, you see.

So I stepped on a shard of glass, well away from the spot where the frame actually fell. It pierced the side of the toe next to my little toe. It was excruciating. A sharp, icy, cruel pain. I literally leaped off the ground when it happened. I hobbled to the chair and extracted the tiny sliver from my toe. It was smaller than a grain of rice, but possessed of incredible power to inflict pain. I walked over to the waste basket and dropped it in. It made a tiny but satisfying “chink” sound as it hit the metal bottom. Then, on the way back to my chair, I stepped on another shard of glass. I was now officially in my own slapstick comedy, bouncing around like a pogo stick, cradling my left foot in my hand, cursing under my breath while trying to chart a course through the room and into the hall that wouldn’t take me over any more broken glass.

This shard lodged near my heel. It’s still in there, I think. My wife poked the bottom of my foot with a sewing needle for about 10 minutes and couldn’t find it. Not even with the toy magnifying glass she grabbed from our son’s secret spy kit, which he got for his birthday a couple of years ago and hasn’t looked at since. We’re a family that thinks ahead, you see, well prepared for any emergency. There is just the tiniest pin prick in the rough skin on the bottom of my foot, a drop of blood no bigger than the head of a pin. Really very small. Probably no more than a dozen angels could dance on it in a pinch. It hurts to touch and makes my whole foot feel sore, though that may just be my imagination. When you are in pain, and can’t immediately find the cause, you imagine you’re in much greater danger than you really are.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg—scientist, astronomer, discover of Lichtenberg figures and aphorist—said it all when he composed this aphorism:

Why does a suppurating lung give so little warning and a sore on the finger so much?

It’s bizarre and scary but true: little things often pain us more than far graver things that keep themselves hidden. The speck of glass that even now may be working its way deeper into the flesh of my left foot hurt a lot today but will soon be forgotten. A close friend told my wife last week that an ex-lover of hers, someone whom at one point she was ready to marry, was diagnosed with lung cancer. He’s in his mid-forties, never smoked, has a couple of kids; now he’s got three months to live. We get no warning, and we have no idea how far the shards of experience will scatter—or when and in what form they will resurface.