Aphorisms

As Umberto Eco says in a lively essay on Oscar Wilde, published in On Literature (2004), "There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism." The word itself, he tells us, comes from the Greek, meaning "putting something aside as an offering." It is also an "oblation." To most people, it calls to mind a short and possibly witty saying that may have something wise to suggest about the nature of life. As with Wilde, such maxims have a paradoxical or (at least) unexpected quality, as when Wilde (in The Picture of Dorian Gray) writes: "An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style."
Eco does not believe that an aphorism needs to be witty, but for its real lovers, that paradoxical twist is difficult to relinquish. We like it when an apparently wise saying goes against the grain, reversing the usual expectations, as when Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, a French aphorist of the 18th century, wrote: "A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is over."
Chamfort's line can be found in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, recently published by Bloomsbury USA. James Geary, writer and editor, has been at the aphoristic fount before, in The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism (Bloomsbury, 2005). Rich in surprises, that marvelous book opened the possibilities for the more comprehensive Guide. Many of the aphorists in the new book will be known to everyone: Plato and Cicero, Michel de Montaigne, Dr. Johnson, Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Wilde, and so forth. But the real pleasures lie in the volume's unexpected treasures: Chamfort, Ludwig Marcuse, Karol Bunsch, Faina Ranevskaya, Ali Ibn Abi Talib, Benjamin Whichcote, and countless others.
Quoting Franklin Roosevelt, Geary begins by saying that his motto in compiling the anthology was: "Be sincere, be brief, be seated." As a result, he does not linger on any one aphorist and offers a brief but entertaining biography of each, with a selection of essential aphorisms followed by a fascinating section called "Parallel Lines." Aphorists like all creative writers to some extent, are gifted plagiarists; that is, they feed on language, taking and transforming what went before them, giving fresh life to what was taken. Ideas belong to no one, only specific language does. And so aphorists take a whiff of what's in the air and put a name to what they smell. Thus we read in Ecclesiastes: "A fool's voice is known by a multitude of words." Centuries later, Ezra Pound says: "The less we know, the longer our explanations."
As Geary observes, aphorisms are usually short and philosophical, and sometimes take the form of the chiasmus, a word deriving from the word chi, the Greek letter X, suggesting an intersection or crossing. From the inimitable Mae West: "It's not the men in your life that matters, it's the life in your men."
Many aphorisms, of course, are simply definitions. If Eco traces the roots of the term to an "offering," Geary sees it differently, explaining that apo means "from" while horos means "boundary." And so an aphorism marks a boundary, circumscribes a particular intellectual space. But Eco's philology complements Geary's: An aphorism is both the marking of a boundary and a gift to the reader. That is the gift of definition, which Samuel Butler, the English novelist, summed up in the aphorism "A definition is the enclosing of a wilderness of idea within a wall of words."
Other aphorisms are simply jokes stripped to their essentials. One thinks here immediately of Mark Twain, a man who lifted the aphorism into the realm of literature: "Unexpected money is a delight. The same sum is a bitterness when you expected more." "It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected."
Twain's lines have the quality of being true but also outrageous. They surprise us, taking a thought in an unexpected direction that, after a brief moment of doubt, seems wonderfully true.
What Geary does with Twain is typical of his approach in his Guide. He takes a famous line, such as "The lack of money is the root of all evil," then offers seven versions of the same line by writers from Shakespeare and Bacon through Heine, Schopenhauer, and Emerson. In doing so, he reveals a tradition of sorts, tracing a thought that extends through the ages and finds various expressions — like a body that puts on new clothes at different times, the clothes always revealing a different aspect of that body. For instance, Butler said: "If the love of money is the root of all evil, the want of it is so quite as truly," a line not unlike Twain's, but somewhat more analytic. Emerson put a philosophical twist on the notion: "Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses."
Among other varieties of aphorism cited by Geary are the moral, the observation, the paradox, and the pensée, the latter being "the most languid and leisurely aphoristic form." One associates it, most famously, with Pascal, who raised the pensée to theological heights, as when he wrote: "A human being is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed." These are usually composed of several linked aphorisms and include a passage of some beauty and profundity, perhaps with paradoxical elements contained within it, as when the Jesuit Baltasar Gracián y Morales wrote:
Keep the extent of your abilities unknown. The wise person does not allow his knowledge and abilities to be sounded to the bottom, if he desires to be honored by all. He allows you to know him but not to comprehend him. No one must know the extent of a wise person's abilities, lest he be disappointed. No one should ever have an opportunity to fathom him entirely. For guesses and doubts about the extent of his talents arouse more veneration than accurate knowledge of them, be they ever so great.
Such advice might profitably be passed around the coffee rooms of most academic departments.
Geary says, in his earlier book on the genre, that he has always been a great collector of aphorisms, and so his books have come naturally. In that, he had numerous examples from some of our great authors, like Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne retired from a career in law at the age of 38 to read and write, securing himself in a tower study at his chateau on the banks of the Dordogne, some 30 miles from Bordeaux. On the wooden beams of his ceiling, he carved many of his favorite aphorisms, mostly taken from ancient sources, including Ecclesiastes. One of my own favorite collections is The Faber Book of Aphorisms, edited by W.H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger. It's a book I've returned to quite often for amusement, solace, and inspiration. The fact is that writers seem deeply in love with the aphorism, perhaps because an aphorism — if it is any good — offers a seed of truth. That seed may well be planted, nurtured, and allowed to bloom. And there is no telling what unlikely flowers may arise.
It is difficult to judge aphorisms, as they can seem true at first but only partially true, as Eco notes, pointing to what he calls the "transposable aphorism," which presents a kind of false paradox: "A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny." Eco quotes an aphorism by Karl Kraus, the caustic Austrian writer: "Easier to forgive an ugly foot than ugly socks." True enough, but it can easily be reversed: "Easier to forgive ugly socks than an ugly foot." Which is actually true? Are both? If so, the aphorism is more a silly joke than a good aphorism, which (ideally) reveals some hidden truth. Transposed aphorisms contain splintered truths, and waste their energy of revelation on being merely witty.
I found myself rereading the aphorisms in Geary's collection, wondering which were transposable, and which might actually be improved by revision. For instance, I noted with some puzzlement the famous Twain maxim: "If we had less statesmanship we could get along with fewer battleships." In fact, a small shift here would seem to make the aphorism truer: "If we had more statesmanship, we could get along with fewer battleships." Then again, the "true" version would seem less than witty, and the effect would be true but perhaps obvious.
It's clear, too, that unless one speaks the language, one can't know, in the case of translated aphorisms, how good the original might have been. The translation problem may well be blamed for some of the maxims in Geary's book that just don't seem to cohere. For example, we have this from Schopenhauer: "The reason the impressions we receive in youth are so significant, the reason why in the dawn of life everything appears to us in so ideal and transfigured a light, is that we then first become acquainted with the genus, which is still new to us, through the individual, so that every individual thing stands as a representative of its genus: we grasp therein the (Platonic) Idea of this genus, which is essentially what constitutes beauty." Something is perhaps lost in translation; in any case, these aphorisms (at least in English) have all the bang of a wet firecracker.
Nevertheless, one can hardly imagine the riches contained in this new anthology, which will stay on my bedside table for the foreseeable future.