Selected Aphorisms

The road reaches every place, the short cut only one.

Those who demand consideration for their sacrifices were making investments, not sacrifices.

You’ve never said anything as stupid as what people thought you said.

It’s easy to renounce the world till you see who picks up what you renounced.

Value yourself according to the burdens you carry, and you will find everything a burden.

The tyrant has first imagined he is a victim.

If men could steal happiness, they would not have to steal anything else.

Each question asks, too, why it had to be asked.

The wound hurts less than your desire to wound me.

Tragic hero, madman, addict, fatal lover. We exalt those who cannot escape their fates because we cannot stay inside our own.

Priceless things cannot be bought, though they are often sold.

Do not blame the fire for knowing one thing.

To condemn your sin in another is hypocrisy. Not to condemn is to reserve your right to sin.

Self-love,strange name. Since it feels neither like loving someone, nor like being loved.

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?

How fix the unhappy couple, when it was unhappiness they loved in each other?

To be admired costs less than to be loved.

He may not deserve your praise, but he deserves to be treated as if some day he might.

First he gathered what he needed. Then he needed to keep gathering what he used to need.

The knife disappears with sharpening.

Pleasure is for you. Joy is for itself.

What exhausts imagination is fear of exhausting it. The gods detest hoarders, giving nothing to those who do not trust them to give.

Patience is decisive indecision.

The things we cannot escape – mortality, desire, shame, loss – make us think we are all the same. The things we want – money, justice, fame – make us think we might be different.

For one who needs it, praise is pity.

Our lives get complicated because complexity is so much simpler than simplicity.

Writer: how books read each other.

The poem in the quarterly is sure to fail within two lines: flaccid, rhythmless, hopelessly dutiful. But I read poets from strange languages with freedom and pleasure because I can believe in all that has been lost in translation. Through all works, all acts, all languages are already translation.

Wind, ocean, fire: the things we like to liken our passions to don’t break, can’t stop.

But for this rock, its shadow says, I could get at the sun.

Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method.

Each of the tastes, each of the colors is a marvel. All of them together are nothing.

Even going back is going forward.

The future would be easier to wait for if we could be sure it wasn’t already happening.

To feel an end is to discover that there had been a beginning. A parenthesis closes that we hadn’t realized was open).

Note: These aphorisms are reprinted from Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays (Ausable Press  2001).

All Work is the Avoidance of Harder Work: Proverb, Aphorism, Poem

                When I mix aphorisms in with poems at a reading, people don't always know what to call them.  Some say "ay-phorisms," which the dictionary finds perfectly acceptable, but which reminds me too much of those bugs that get all over your plants.   More often, they’ll say "I liked your proverbs."   That's interesting, and seems almost right.   One editor referred to them as "your long-lined poems," and that seems...less right.

            So, I want to think a little about what aphorisms are.  About their generic differences from proverbs and poems.   And maybe a little about the practical differences, that is, differences in where they come from, how they get written.      

            The base of the word "aphorism" is the Greek word for "horizon," and it means to delimit or define.   I'm going to take that idea of “definition” seriously in a bit, but it's probably not much help without some good specimens of the aphorism.  The classic examples would be the 17th-century Maxims of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld.   This is probably his most famous one:

We all have strength enough to endure the troubles...of others.

A near cliché, then a little twist in the sentence – I’ve added ellipsis where a stand-up comic might pause – and then ...ouch.  The wicked Duc specializes in Ouch Moments.   He likes to pick out the strands of vanity and self-deception in our incalculably mixed feelings:

Everybody complains of his memory, but no one of his judgment.

Sometimes we dislike flattery, but it is only the way it is done that we dislike.

Over-eagerness to repay a debt is itself a kind of ingratitude.

No people are more often wrong than those who cannot bear to be.

It is more shameful to distrust one’s friends than to be deceived by them.

Almost always we are bored by people to whom we ourselves are boring.

Fortunate people seldom mend their ways, for when good luck crowns their misdeeds with success, they think it is because they are right.

These are smart and merciless, and when you read all 600 of them you have to struggle not to believe his first assumption, namely that all of our motivations come down to self–love.

            And here's my hero, Antonio Porchia.  He was born in Italy, emigrated to Argentina, wrote in Spanish, and is known to American readers through W. S. Merwin's translation of a selection of his work, Voices, which appeared soon after his death in 1968.  

Before I traveled my road I was my road.

He who holds me by a thread is not strong; the thread is strong.

You will find the distance that separates you from them, by joining them.

A full heart has room for everything and an empty heart has room for nothing.  Who understands?

I know what I have given you.  I do not know what you have received.

Not using faults does not mean that one does not have them.

Almost always it is fear of being ourselves that brings us to the mirror. 

You can imagine La Rochefoucauld's maxims arising in the tensely competitive French court.  Porchia’s are different in range, lonelier, more existential.   Some have said Eastern.

            And finally, if only so you can be on cutting edge of the Aphorism Revolution, here are some of my favorites from a mysterious book called Last Aphorisms that was self-published a few years ago by an author known only as "JPJ."

Do not fear evil until it establishes itself as good.

Is he honest who keeps all his lies secret?

We cry "Glorious mountain!" at the base of the mountain and "Glorious me! at the top.

Imaginary mountains are the easiest to climb and the hardest to see from.

Ask a bird "What is necessary for flight?" and it will say "Food and rest." 

No matter of what they accuse you, "I'm human" sounds like a confession.

            As I mentioned, readers who aren't familiar with the word "aphorism" call them "proverbs," and I think we feel instinctively that's at least half-true.   For one thing, the proverbial is one aspiration –or limit— of the aphorism.  I'm guessing many aphorists have the paradoxical ambition of having a few of their aphorisms detach themselves from authorship and become proverbial.  Like the old joke about Shakespeare, "Ah, the plays are full of clichés."   Meaning things you've heard already because Shakespeare made them famous.   On the other hand, there's an occasional proverb sharp enough to feel like an aphorism.  How about "A poor man's cow dies, a rich man's child"?

            Basically, all proverbs are all written by Anon.  Not only don't we know who he– or she– is, he hardly ever refers to himself.   He never says "I".  He's a little shy of pronouns in general, preferring nouns.  Anon is a canny and slightly weary fellow, unsurprised by what life does to us.  "Man proposeth, God disposeth," he'll say, or "This too shall pass."  He has a taste for the general and reusable.  Unlike a poet, he doesn't worry whether we've heard his exact words millions of times.  Nor does he have a philosopher's care for consistency.  One day he says, "Many hands make light work."   The next day he says, "Too many cooks spoil the broth."  "Haste makes waste," but then, "He who hesitates is lost."  Of course, you should "Stop and smell the roses," he says.   But don't forget that "Time is money."

            Anon has neither the ambition nor the naiveté of the systematizer.   He's definitely not a scientist, and only in the cracker-barrel sense a philosopher.   His truths, though stated very generally, are applied quite locally.  When he says, "Like father, like son" he doesn't expect anyone to object, "Wait, I know a son who's not like his father."  He means that right here in front of us right now, a particular son has behaved just as his father might have.  

            Proverbs, that is, are tied to occasions.  They are pre-formulated responses to eternally recurring situations.  "Ah," they sigh, "it is as we have always known."  They have to have a certain memorability, or anyway, memorizability, since they’re carried in the head– even cultures without writing systems are rich in proverbs.  Their memorability might be enhanced by symmetry of sound, or rhyme, or syntax, as in, "Like father, like son."  Or by an apt but easily gettable metaphor like, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree"—same proverb, almost.  Both of these things can also be true of poems and aphorisms. 

            A distinction.  Proverbs can be anything from cheery to resigned to downright cynical, but they are never funny, and relatively seldom even what we'd call witty.   They pass from hand to hand, mouth to mouth and get smoothed down— they have to belong to everyone.   Maybe humor doesn't.  Maybe all jokes are in-jokes.  I don't believe in the inevitable aggressiveness of wit– Freud’s “work and love” should be “work and love and play,” where each of the three has shadings of the other two– but a joke does have an inside and an outside.  You start off not knowing something, and you have to be standing in the right place or looking from the right angle to "get it," to get inside it.  Which means, first of all, that you have to see it might be a joke.   Think of all the ironic e-mails you've written that people took straight: thus the invention of smiley-face.

            You might have noticed that proverbs and aphorisms share– and share with jokes and puns and riddles– the technique of splitting a word or idea in two, of starting on one of its tracks and veering onto another.  Even actually repeating a key word in two different contexts.  “Before I traveled my road, I was my road.”   “All work is the avoidance of harder work.”

            Yogi Berra, the Hall of Fame catcher for the New York Yankees, once said of a hot restaurant.   "Nobody goes there any more.   It's too crowded."   When we start that, "nobody goes there" means "nobody at all."  By the end, after we're forced to adjust by the paradoxical "it's too crowded," it has switched to meaning "nobody I care about, none of my friends would go there" or "I don't go there."   We start with a definition and are surprised/amused by the re-definition.

                Maybe that's not an aphorism, more like a joke?

            But it works just like Yogi's famous "It ain't over till it's over."   Which counts as an aphorism, I think.   Maybe by now even as a Proverb.  It isn't funny. ( Is it?)  But the track switch or doubletake or redefinition is related to what happens in jokes, puns, riddles, maybe in metaphor in general.  See James Geary’s books on aphorism and metaphor.

            In Yogi's case, you might be within your rights to wonder if he even intended to be witty.  The Press was never quite sure if he was a moron and a genius.  Maybe "Nobody goes there any more.  It's too crowded" was just an accident, a stumble.  More on this later, but that's one reason to be interested in the aphorism -- it's often so short it's hard to say it's intended, worked on, "written."  Or think how often you have to say "No pun intended."   Because it's true -- it's more like the language did it than you did.   Perhaps Yogi himself crystallizes the problem.  Once, talking about the expanding canon of Yogi-isms, he remarked.   "I really didn't say everything I said."

            The track switch doesn't have to involve the exact repetition of a word, an obvious definition and redefinition, but strikingly often it does.   “It ain't over till it's over.”  “I really didn't say everything I said.” Take Porchia:

Before I traveled my road, I was my road. 

“Road” starts out as something like a path you can walk on, it ends up being something you are.  His aphorism defines and then re-defines it.  There's a stumble, a step you didn't know was there.  Here, it's not funny, but the line deepens under you.  Sometimes when you fall, you laugh.  Sometimes there's a vaguer but related sense of having "fallen for it," which is what we say when we've been tricked or surprised.  But sometimes you just hurt a lot, or a little, as here– isn’t there a loss in the before and after?  Note, too, that the sequence matters.  Reversing it– "I was my road before I traveled my road" completely flattens it.  The stumble, or what James Geary calls the “twist,” is gone — as if you started a joke with the punchline. It has become merely a statement.  “All stones are broken stones” is maybe an aphorism wanting to be a proverb.   Whereas “All broken stones are stones” is...duh!

            OK, so these doubletakes or track-switches are related to what happens in jokes.  And in their slight fussiness with their terms, their hairsplitting repetition, there’s a self-consciousness, a wit, that again may or may not exactly be funny but doesn’t feel proverbial.   You might think of it as a failed equation. "A (oops) does not quite equal A." 

            I've said Proverbs refer to a situation in front of you.   THIS proverb = THAT situation.  They tend not to be equations within themselves, as these aphorisms do.  The aphorism shares the proverb's fondness for concision, for metaphors, for general applicability, but it would like to be independent of a specific situation, to survive surrounded by white space.  And maybe by other aphorisms.   All the aphorisms I've quoted are from books of aphorisms.  If the proverb applies itself to an outside situation, the aphorism, like a joke, sets up its own situation and then knocks it down, gets us walking and then pulls the rug out, starts on one road and ends up on another.  

            So maybe aphorisms are part proverb, part joke.   And maybe we can say they state and then revise the definitions that the proverb takes for granted.   Let me go a few steps further out on my limb.  Here is something from the wackier end of the aphoristic spectrum -- perhaps the more poetic end.  These are “greguerías” translated from the 20th century Spanish writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna:

Marble is the soap of eternity.            

A grey sky means that the day is going to be like a film.

Milk is whipped sleep.

A kiss is a nothing in brackets.

These are all of the form a=b, but are they aphorisms?   Maybe they feel more like micro-poems, or just metaphors?   Definition and metaphor are actually both of the form “a=b” or “a is like b” (let’s skip the tedious argument about metaphor vs. simile).  They are on the same spectrum.  A dictionary definition, for example, tries to find fairly exact equivalents.   “Stone. Definition 1.  Earthy or mineral matter.”   A dictionary would not be happy with "soap of eternity."  The emphasis is on making "b" as much like "a" as possible.   But there's a limit.   You can't use the word you're defining in the definition.  "Stone.  Definition 1:  Stone" doesn't work.   Tautology, identity, perfect similarity are not definition.  They are not metaphor, either.   "A stone is a stone" is not metaphor.   In fact, we hear it as explicitly anti-metaphorical.   It says a stone is only what it is, we accept no fancy substitutes, no literary ambiguity.    The law is the law.   Business is business.

            Both definition and metaphor assume not only similarity but difference, more so with metaphor.   “Stone is earthy or mineral matter” works as part of a definition.  It's not a real good metaphor -- the two halves aren't different enough to be interesting.  “A stone is like a brick” might be a little closer to metaphor, but it's still flat, still not different enough.  With "stony-hearted" we're in clichéd metaphor territory -- "heart" is a little "further away" from stone than "brick" is, though there's a well-trodden path between them, nay a superhighway.  But if we say a stone is an entire universe -- that once you're inside you see a whole night sky -- we're in the territory of Nerval's poem about stones, or Charles Simic's famous “Stone”: “Go inside a stone.  That would be my way.”  Ah!  Can the difference be too great?  "Stones are angry VCR's" goes past making sense to being silly.  Surrealisms often walk that line.  “Stones are telephone books” goes past making sense to not even being silly, maybe to us thinking, "Is that a typo?  Please explain.”

            The metaphors or definitions of Ramón (as he called himself) don't exactly have the joke's little stumble and fall, a definition giving way and a new definition clicking into place— they are more like being sucked out a spaceship at lightspeed.   They are a vertigo, a reach into an associative realm of language and image where it's harder to describe why something feels right or true, or why it doesn't (he has a high rate of misfires, I think, though I love all the ones I’ve quoted).    I think we could come up with an explanation for how "Marble is the soap of eternity” works.  Having to do with whiteness, sculpturally shaped soaps, the cleanliness or neutrality of cultural cliché, or, anachronistically something about soapiness in the sense of corniness and Soap Operas (named for their detergent ads).   It would take a couple of paragraphs, there would be loose ends flapping all over the place, and we'd have a hard time getting a committee to sign off on it, because the associations it depends on are more variable from person to person, more private.

            To speak more practically, back in 1993, I was looking in Montaigne for help with an essay on metaphor to be called "On Likeness."   A footnote sent me to the maxims of La Rochefoucauld, which I read not only with delight but with something like ricochet.  "Wait, that's not right," I'd mutter, or "That's not all," scribbling some correction or analogue or sequel to one of his insights.  My response often felt like a rotation or flipping or twisting of the Duc's sentences, a spatial skill not unlike those involved in making metaphors, doing math and solving various small household problems.  Maybe it's not coincidental that I was, at the time, mildly addicted to the now ancient video game Tetris, which as you may remember involves fitting together rapidly falling colored shapes to form a block without gaps.  When I first saw James Geary, editor of Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, reciting aphorisms while juggling, I thought I knew what was going on.

            Actually, I should have said "my responses" to La Rochefoucauld's aphorism.  Plural, since often I'd end up with many slightly different versions of the same aphorism, equivalent as ideas but not as experiences, sequences.   They came so quickly that it felt more like reading than writing:  Good Taste would later have to choose which version worked, which snapped or cracked or surprised best, which chimed most cleanly.  I thought of them as isomers, chemical compounds which have the same formula but may differ utterly in their properties because they are different shapes.    

            This leads me to one quite practical test of the difference between proverbs and aphorisms.   Lots of poets, probably most, read poems as part of writing poems.  And I often read aphorisms when I’m trying to write them.   Responding, flipping, analogizing, rotating them into my own.  To read The Oxford Book of Aphorisms (which I recommend) or Antonio Porchia is to eat a bowl of corn chips.  I can barely make myself think about each one long enough to write before going on to the next one.  In contrast, to read a collection of proverbs is to suffocate in a room of pure carbon dioxide, already-breathed air.  The only reason to do it is to study the proverb.  

            I have never, ever derived an aphorism from reading proverbs.  Why?  Seems to be that in their smoothness and generality, they are unflippable, like pizza dough the diameter of the room.  You can say the opposite of a proverb's meaning, but as I've already intimated, that's already another proverb and just as smothering.  Proverbs seem designed to end conversations, in the "Good fences make good neighbors" way.  You could easily imagine a "dueling proverbs" kind of argument between two people.  Indeed, some cultures use proverbs in judicial proceedings, much as we use precedents.  But aphorisms argue within themselves about the kinds of truths proverbs insist on.

            No one will ever write a novel by accident.  A poem, too, takes time.  You remember working on it and at least have the illusion of knowing how you did it.  But if I say, "Pick a word" and you say one, where did it come from?  You certainly don't say you "wrote it" or "created it" -- more like you chose it.   But you have no idea how you chose it– it just rose to mind (who went down there and got it?)— so maybe it chose you.   I said something similar about puns— the language seems to give them to you.  One-liners must be in the middle of that spectrum, as much accident as composition.  Almost all proverbs and most of the jokes that make the rounds are anonymous:  who came up with them, and how?  I feel that way about some of my aphorisms, as if couldn't claim authorship.  I do anyway – "Deem yourself inevitable and take credit for it" says W. S. Merwin!— but I have a soft spot for the ones that sound most like proverbs written by no one, short and unsophisticated, their reference restricted to nature and household, faintly animist or fabulous or parabolic: 

Snakes cannot back up.

Nothing dirtier than old soap.

Birds of prey don't sing.

Water deepens where it has to wait. 

            But they aren't proverbs, are they?  Or maybe only the last one?  There's something a little uncertain about how and when you would apply them that makes them more like aphorisms, or even poems.  

            Probably in looking back, I've exaggerated the automatism and impersonality of the form, not to mention its uniformity.  An aphorism can be like a proverb.   It can certainly be an "a is not quite a" redefinition, but it's just as likely to be a chiasmus.   Take Karl Kraus’s "Journalists write because they have nothing to say and have something to say because they write," which is perhaps a double redefinition.   And a contemporary collection of aphorisms (see the anthologies Short Flights and Short Circuits edited by James Lough and Alex Stein) might also contain things more like wisecrack, paradox, word-play, parable, psychological or natural observation, a quick out-take from a dramatic scene, and anything from a sentence fragment to a mini-essay.  The longer aphorisms are, the more labor they absorb, and the more they start to sound like their author.  Certainly, I work at them.  Certainly, they can end up as thoughts I could have imagined myself thinking, but that feels to me like their eventual limitation, not their origin.

I look over my old books, happiest when I find a line it seems I could not have written.

            Still, some aphorisms I claim not only as mine but as me.   "All work is the avoidance of harder work" and "The best time is stolen time" are something like personal mottoes, and I also think of them privately as about writing aphorisms.  I.e., I tend to write poems when there’s some more practical and unpleasant task I’m putting off, and I tend to work on aphorisms when I lack the deeper patience required to work on poems.  What has by now become something like a thousand aphorisms and ten-second essays spread over five books feels to me like a long procrastination, a parenthesis in that essay on metaphor that I started writing in 1993...and still, except for this part, haven't finished.