Aphorisms

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…

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.