Fortuna stands some seven feet tall, on a pedestal overlooking seven Black automatons, in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Roberts Family Gallery. The mechanized figures in plots of obsidian perform a kind of ritual resurrection: One automaton, limbs flailing, repeatedly rises from and falls to the ground, summoned by another robot dressed in the robes of a prophet.
Fortuna takes it all in, periodically raising her arm and pointing to her mouth as an aphorism printed on a slip of paper pops out:
Your last shred of dignity is often your best.
Life is the abyss into which we deliberately and joyfully thrust ourselves.
Artists cannot be expected to follow instructions.
This diorama of suffering and redemption is Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) by Kara Walker, an artist whose cut-paper silhouettes and installations have long engaged with complex issues of race, racism, and identity, as does this work. Fortuna the machine is also a contemporary variation on the crude mechanical fortune tellers once found in penny arcades. Drop a coin into the slot at the amusement park, and Zoltar or Madame Zita would produce a card with a prediction of your future on it. Fortuna herself may be a wonder of modern animatronics, but dispensing cryptic wisdom goes back to the beginnings of the aphorism and is one of the oldest ways we make sense of our world.
Aphorisms are the original oracles. Walker’s Fortuna connects today’s museumgoers with the people thousands of years ago who played the I Ching or consulted Pythia, the priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, for insights on the future and guidance on the here and now. The aphorism is, in some ways, perfectly suited to the digital age: The oldest form of literature finds its ideal vehicle in the most modern short modes of communication. Connecting current expressions of the aphorism with its ancient roots is one reason I’ve prepared a new edition of The World in A Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, twenty years after it first appeared.
New aphorists are featured throughout this second edition of The World in a Phrase — from a Roman orator and an Austrian countess to a Harlem Renaissance poet and a Colombian philosopher — encompassing more voices and bringing this brief history up to date. Twenty-six additional aphorists have been added to the original thirty-eight, for a total of sixty-four practitioners through which the history of the form is told.
When the book was first published in 2005, Facebook had only just been founded and Twitter didn’t exist. In the two decades since, the proliferation of social media — which places a premium on brevity, the aphorism’s essence — has created forums in which this shortest of short forms can thrive. Twitter, after all, has the word ‘wit’ in it. An entirely new chapter at the end of the book features those using new platforms to take the form into the future, including meme-makers, street artists, and visual aphorists who mix pithy language with compelling imagery.
Twitter, of course, also has the word ‘twit’ in it and, now known as X, it marks the spot where the unaphoristic reigns, from gauzy inspirational quotes to byte-sized chunks of outrage. This new edition addresses the crucial differences between aphorisms and hot takes and rage posts, and it explores why, especially as generative AI programs like ChatGPT threaten to reduce our cognitive loads to zero, it is essential to our psychological survival to think aphoristically. Aphorisms remain the ultimate deep dives, even in our era of fractured attention spans, when TL;DR has become the catchphrase of a generation.
Kara Walker’s work is part of the millennia-old tradition of the aphorism. Her aphorisms are proof of the enduring vitality of the form and its continuing popularity today. My hope is that this updated edition of The World in a Phrase will be timely and relevant for new readers as well as longtime aphorist aficionados.
