wit

I first blogged about Peter Yovu’s aphorisms back in 2012. Now, just in time for the new year, here’s a selection of his more recent sayings…

Self is to consciousness what salt is to sea.

The end plays dead and lets you find it.

Fear of Death: it’s like knowing I have an appointment with the dentist except it’s not just a tooth that will be extracted.

More often the miracle is what does not happen.

I broke a stone to see what was inside. It was no longer inside.

I peeled the label. Some of my skin came off with it.

It is always the last place you look.

The mirror I practice in does not accept my apology.

Thanks again to Dave Lull for spotting this piece about Peter De Vries, novelist, New Yorker writer and aphorist, in Commentary. “De Vries is one of the best comic novelists that America has ever produced, and comic novelists do poorly over the long run of literary history,” writes D.G. Myers. “Other than Mark Twain, Ring Lardner, and perhaps Dawn Powell, Americans have tended to discard their humorists after a generation. Josh Billings, Petroleum V. Nasby, Ambrose Bierce, George Ade, Finley Peter Dunne, Will Cuppy, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, Harry Golden, S. J. Perelman, H. Allen Smith, Leonard Q. Ross — these are names from a textbook, not living writers … De Vries developed a taste for verbal humor while working on a community newspaper in Chicago after leaving school. ‘The result,’ he told an interviewer: ‘I truly enjoy local, homespun philosophers. Right on top of that I actually did write Pepigrams [e.g., “To turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones — pick up your feet”], for use as wall mottoes and such. I got two bucks a Pepigram, and they got stuck in my blood.’ Selected pepigrams:

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.

When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.

Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair.

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.

Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.

We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.

Every novel should have a beginning, a muddle, and an end.

Dave Lull comes through again, this time with notice of what just might be the first book-length publication of Nicolás Gómez-Dávila’s aphorisms (Geary’s Guide, pp. 331-332)—or, scholia, as he called them—Scholia to an Implicit Text, in a review in the journal First Things. “If Gómez-Dávila is ever declared a saint, admittedly a very remote possibility, he should be taken up as the patron of nihilists—which is to say, of most of us on our worst days,” writes Matthew Walther. “His work is a complement to, if not a substitute for, gin, tobacco, and constant prayer.” There is also this piece by Chris R. Morgan in The American Conservative. Selected scholia:

Journalism was the cradle of literary criticism. The university is its grave.

Vulgarity consists not in what vulgar people do but in what pleases them.

Reading newspapers debases him whom it does not stultify.

The modern world shall not be punished. It is the punishment.

No folk tale has ever begun thus: ‘Once upon a time there was a president.’

Today there is no-one to fight for. Only against.

A nude body solves every problem of the universe.

Paula Cocozza of The Guardian writes, “Inspirational quotes are everywhere. What’s going on? And do they really help?”

Inspirational quotes operate as currency on social media – not only in terms of the way their wisdom is handled and passed on, but because motivational tweets have become a key indicator of a person worth following. In 2013, Forbes ran a list of the most influential people on social media. (There is no escape: clicking that link will activate a pop-up “Quote of the Day”. Enjoy!) Haydn Shaughnessy compiled the data, and noticed that the most influential people on Twitter offered a stream of motivational content. “When we looked at leading social media influencers in 2012, they were all people who created a lot of content. By 2013,” he says, “it was much more likely that a top influencer would be tweeting inspiration instead of creating separate content. The reason? People probably don’t read content anyway, they just share it.”

Read the rest of the piece here.

The metaphorically minded, aphoristically inclined Dave Lull sends links to three recent pieces on your favorite topic and mine: metaphor…

First, a nice overview of ‘metaphorical effects’, “instances in which a metaphor commonly used to describe a psychological state or social reality can, in turn, induce that state or reality,” writes Lisa Wade in Pacific Standard, including becoming suspicious when the odor of fish is present.

Second, an exploration of whether the brain notices, or cares, about the differences among literal, metaphorical, and idiomatic expressions, by Michael Chorost in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Third, a critique of Chorost’s piece by Micah Mattix in The American Conservative.

I first published some of Beston Jack Abrams’s Abramisms in 2007, then again in 2011, and once more in 2012. Having come to aphorisms late in life, Mr. Arbrams is nothing if not prolific. He returns here with more astute observations on silence, solitude and setbacks…

Nothing causes greater adherence to an opinion than opposition to it.

As adversity recedes so does innovation.

Small steps are as valuable as big ones: in the end they bring us to the same place.

It is clear we agree that truth is beauty; therefore it must also be clear that untruths are ugly.

Opinions are robust: they persist without support.

Few silences are unbiased.

Silence is a portable sanctuary.

The first impression reveals as much about the observer as the observed.

Death can be defined as the exhaustion of our options.

Contentment wears slippers; curiosity wears boots.

Unsuccessful people are essential since without them how would we know we are superior.

On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss is an investigation into and rumination upon vaccination, the cultural myths and fears surrounding it, and the deliberations new parents must make when deciding whether they should or shouldn’t vaccinate their children. The book was inspired by the birth of Biss’s first child, but it is also deeply informed by Biss’s engagement with metaphor. “The British call it a ‘jab,’ and Americans, favoring guns, call it a ‘shot,'” she writes. “Either way, vaccination is violence … The metaphors we find in this gesture are overwhelmingly fearful, and almost always suggest violation, corruption, and pollution.” If you’re looking for a smart analysis of the confluence of metaphor and medical decisions, this is it. Here’s a review from the LATimes, an interview from NPR and a sneak peek from publisher Graywolf.

During an afternoon of reading and writing, came across this timely rumination by Leland de la Durantaye in the Harvard Review, “The Art of Ignorance: An Afterword to Ludwig Börne.” The article features a translation of Börne’s prescient essay “The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days”, about which I blogged back in 2006, and goes on to consider Börne’s influence on Freud and Schopenhauer’s typically ornery take on a world in which there is too much to read because too much is published. Sound familiar?

Schopenhauer is , of course, author of one of the best aphorisms about reading:

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

An excerpt from de la Durantaye’s short piece follows, but the article is worth reading in full.

“In 1851, towards the end of a long life of reading, Schopenhauer wrote of the “high importance” of “the art of not reading. This was a response to new developments—what he called “the literature which in our days is spreading like weeds.” This “Unkraut der Literatur” that, in his view, threatened to overrun the age is what he was seeking to address. His dialectical mind was not long in finding the means to this end.

If there was too much to read, the solution was to not read. For Schopenhauer, a singular danger awaited those who did not cultivate this “art of not reading.” This was that the clever minds of the day might become “der Tummelplatz fremder Gedanken,” the “playground of others’ thoughts.”

To make the matter clear he offered a comparison. Just as in physical matters when someone never walks but only ever rides, he will sooner or later lose the ability to move of his own accord, so too, he reasoned, must things proceed in mental matters. Given the profusion of things to read, he worried that his age would “read itself stupid.” It was to counter this danger that he recommended his special art.”

TED redesigned its website a while back, adding some nifty new features speakers can use to expand on the ideas in their talks. I did my Metaphorically Speaking talk in 2009, when I was neck-deep in the research for what eventually became I Is an Other, and did a two-minute turn on aphorisms at the same event. For those interested in some more information on the backgrounds to those talks, check out my recommended reading list and annotated citations. The talk has been translated into 27 languages, including Hebrew, Persian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

In the 1940s, Mignon McLaughlin (1913-1983) became an editor at Vogue and for the next three decades or so wrote or edited for most of the big women’s magazines in New York City, including Cosmopolitan, Red Book, Good Housekeeping and Glamour. In the 1950s, she began publishing aphorisms that were later collected in three books—The Neurotic’s Notebook, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook and The Complete Neurotic’s Notebook. The Brabant Press has brought together a new edition of McLaughlin’s wry, mordant observations in Apercus: The Aphorisms of Mignon McLaughlin. The ‘apercu’ in the title is fitting, since McLaughlin reads a little bit like a suburban La Rochefoucauld (Geary’s Guide pp. 131-134) and covers many of the same themes: the fickleness of love, the falsity of social relations, the foibles of the sophisticated. There’s also a hint of Dorothy Parker (Geary’s Guide pp. 296-297) here, less of the word play but the same bitter cynicism. In fact, if Dorothy Parker had a part in Mad Men, she might have come up with witticisms like these. McLaughlin has been largely forgotten. Hopefully, this Brabant edition will rectify that oversight.

The know-nothings are, unfortunately, seldom the do-nothings.

Love looks forward, hate looks back, and anxiety has eyes all over its head.

I am a splendid daughter to the parents of my friends.

Learning too soon our limitations, we never learn our powers.

“Pull yourself together” is seldom said to anyone who can.

What you can’t get out of, get into wholeheartedly.

We always prefer war on our own terms to peace on someone else’s.

Most of us would rather risk catastrophe than read the directions.

The time to begin most things is ten years ago.

Everybody can write; writers can’t do anything else.

Much of the time we just tread water, for the raft is too far away and we have got tired of swimming.

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times—always with the same person.