Lazarus Long, also known as Woodrow Wilson Smith, is a recurring character in a clutch of novels by science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein. I read Heinlein’s classic “Stranger in a Strange Land” as a teenager and immediately grokked its iconoclastic, counterculture message. It wasn’t until much later that I realized Heinlein’s prose is extremely aphoristic in a gruff, ornery sort of way; he often punctuates descriptive passages with provocative little pronouncements about the nature of good government, the evils of organized religion or the joys of sex. His sayings have a frontier feel: blunt, graphic, no-nonsense.

That might explain why some of Heinlein’s best lines are put into the mouth of Lazarus Long, a real interstellar pioneer if there ever was one. Long is the oldest member of the human race (one of the books he appears in is called “Methuselah’s Children”) by dint of some nifty genetic engineering and his own unfailing instinct for survival. He’s sired countless children, explored new solar systems and planets, and distinguished himself for bravery in interplanetary warfare. Lazarus Long has seen it all and survived to tell the tale, through a string of zesty, zingy aphorisms.As a character, Long is a weird combination of Teddy Roosevelt and Mark Twain: tough as old boots on the outside, a roughrider over received wisdom, but concealing a bright and piercing wit within. He’s also got a whiff of Walt Whitman about him; he’s singing the song of himself assured in the knowledge that everyone else knows the tune too. A short selection of his aphorisms, which bear up well under long scrutiny:

Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.

Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.

A motion to adjourn is always in order.

It is better to copulate than never.

You live and learn. Or you don’t live long.

Being a regular posting of some of the sayings sent to me via my website, helpfully annotated and wonderfully instructive…

During the signing session after a talk I gave this week in London, a man asked me to autograph a copy of my book for his son. I always try to write a personalized aphorism when I’m signing a book, so I asked the man to tell me something about his son. He thought for a moment and then said, “Well, he’s a teenager.” I was momentarily stumped; I didn’t know any aphorisms about teenagers. Then I remembered someone had sent me a saying on this subject just recently, and wrote from memory:

You can talk to teenagers; you just can’t tell them anything.

Apologies are due to Martin Goldstein, who actually wrote:

You can always tell a teenager, you just can’t tell them much.

Which puts me in mind of Yoda’s advice to the young Luke Skywalker, sent by David P. Calvert:

Do or do not. There is no try.

Yoda’s cryptic quip plays off the same kind of dichotomy as this piece of advice, proferred to Renee Horvarth by an old woman from Oklahoma upon hearing that Renee intended to remain friends with the man with whom she had just broken off a romance:

You can’t throw out your garbage and keep it too.

I am indebted to Amos Oliver Doyle for bringing the aphorisms of Patience Worth to my attention. Hers is a strange tale, and her aphorisms are stranger still…

Patience Worth was born in England in 1649, and travelled to America with some of the early English settlers when she was in her thirties. By her own account, she had a fiesty, witty personality and held some unconventional views for her time, especially about religion. She was killed in a skirmish with Native Americans. At least, that’s what Pearl Lenore Curran says Patience Worth told her over a period of about 25 years, beginning in 1912. Curran, a St. Louis, Missouri housewife who died in 1937, claimed to have been in telepathic contact with Patience Worth some 260 years after the latter’s death—and to have taken posthumous dictation, with the help of a ouiji board, of Worth’s poems, novels and “proverbs.”

You don’t have to believe in communication with the dead to be interested in this apparent psychic collaboration; Patience’s words of wisdom are worth a quick look. Proverbs is the right word to describe them, too, since the language is archaic and the themes very Old Testament. In his book The Case of Patience Worth, Walter Franklin Prince writes: “… almost immediately after Patience Worth announced herself … she began to make replies, which in pith, wit, wisdom and generally in terseness, resemble the proverbs of old time.” My favorite relates to Worth’s penchant for heresy:

A fiery tongue belongs to one worth burning.

Other sayings are just bizarre. I have no idea what to make of:

Should’st I present thee with a pumpkin, would’st thou desire to count the seeds?

Sometimes, Worth/Curran achieve a bracing clarity:

It taketh a wise man to be a good fool.

That’s not a bad aphorism. But William Blake, another English aphorist who chatted with the spirits of the deceased, said it earlier and better:

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.