Vladimir Putin is out with his latest annual calendar, which attempts to portray the Russian dictator in various manly, domestic, and statesmanlike settings. Each page of the calendar is accompanied by an attempt to portray the Russian dictator saying some vaguely manly, domestic, and statesmanlike thing, such as this oblique reference to Putin’s barbaric war against Ukraine: “Russia’s border never ends.” More accurate would be to accompany each picture with an aphorism from William Ralph Inge, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London from 1911 until his death in 1954, such as these…

A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he can’t sit on it.

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.

While at the Charleston Literary Festival, I visited the International African American Museum, located on the site of Gadsden’s Wharf, the arrival point in the U.S. for as many as 100,000 enslaved Africans. There I saw one of the stoneware jugs made by the enslaved potter David Drake. During the time Drake was at work in Edgefield, South Carolina, an area known for its stoneware, literacy was illegal for enslaved people. So it was a remarkable and dangerous act of defiance for him to write on his jars and jugs. He did it anyway, adding aphoristic couplets on moral, spiritual, and practical themes to his vessels.

Give me silver or; either gold

though they are dangerous; to our soul

I wonder where is all my relations

Friendship to all – and every nation

While in DC for a talk at Politics and Prose, I dropped by the Phillips Collection, where I sat in the Rothko room for a rumination and also spotted “Girl Writing” (1941) by Milton Avery, a poignant depiction of the composition process…