from Best Thought, Worst Thought: On Art, Sex, Work, and Death—Aphorisms
On the morning the Barbarians wandered through the gates, everyone in Rome had their feet up and was reading a foreword.
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The aphorism is a brief waste of time. The poem is a complete waste of time. The novel is a monumental waste of time.
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The aphorism: too much too soon or too little too late, but never just enough for the time being.
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Yes I know Marcus Aurelius or Vauvenargues or Chesterton has already said this, and far more elegantly; but let's face it, you weren't listening then either.
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The aphorism will often contain one italicized word; this denotes its magnetic North, not its direction.
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Key: read I for he; R. for S.; no one for you; it for I.
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The shorter the form, the greater our expectation of its significance—and the greater its capacity for disappointing us. A book of aphorisms is a lexicon of disappointments. The form's only virtue is its brevity; at least the reader cannot seriously hold that it has wasted their time.
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The aphorism is nobody speaking to nobody; it's less read than eavesdropped upon. God knows, it's barely even written: I disown them immediately.
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Despite our attempts to imbue them with some flavor, any flavor—aphorisms all turn out so . . . generic; they all sound as if they were delivered by the same disenfranchised, bad-tempered minor deity.
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The aphorism is the rational articulation of a fleeting hysteria.
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S. has written a comprehensive book of aphorisms. He has made a vast list of subjects, then sat down and composed his brilliancy on each of them—even those on which he had no opinion, until that very moment.
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How many aphorists does it take to change a lightbulb? How many aphorists does it take to change a lightbulb? . . . And so on with our little antipoetry, our ear to the strongbox of the line while we work the combinations, trying the italics on one word, then the next, until we hear something weaken inside. . .
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A book of aphorisms makes no pretense to engage the reader in any sort of dialogue; to judge by its tone of relentless asseveration, it has no opinion of them. What the reader feels is a kind of ultimate contempt, that of ink for the human, the mineral for the animal.
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Z. has numbered his aphorisms. Now he has added a cumulative disappointment.
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Poetic truth occurs at that point in the steady refinement of a form of words where they cease to be paraphrasable, but have not yet become purely oracular. Also, perhaps, a definition of the aphorism, its talentless, tone-deaf brother.
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Allowed myself a smile this morning at a letter innocently referring to "my love of the aphoristic form." Heavens—do you think if I really had a choice, I would write this? We occupy the margins through fate, not allegiance.
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The difference between the aphorism and the poem is that the aphorism states its conclusion first. It is a form without tension, and therefore simultaneously perfect and perfectly dispensable. There is no road, no tale, no desire.
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Here is a very bad aphorism for the purpose of illustrative quotation.
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Tried to rewrite this book as less self-important; gave up, realizing that was its only virtue.
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Reading a book of aphorisms diligently in the sequence they appear makes about as much sense as eating a large jar of onions diligently in the sequence they appear; and no one should try to finish either in one sitting.
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Notes on a few aphorists:
Canetti: he did not really understand the aphoristic form. In an intelligence like his, this should tell us something of the . . . obscurity of the skill. "Rarity" might imply it had a value.
Chesterton: the only really great aphorist in English. Halifax is okay, but all the rest—Hazlitt and (curiously) Wilde excepted—are wits. The Anglophone embarrassment in regards to the unilateral assertion—which it cannot help thinking of as a subset of "wisdom literature"—began very early. This it sees as the sole preserve of the holy books; all other attempts at it are laughed away uncomfortably, on the grounds, ultimately, of their seedy human provenance. You would think such a culturally ingrained self-hatred would make the English ideal aphorists. However you can be overqualified for the task.
Cocteau: he would have been the greatest, but he was far too happy. The dominant harmony and black dissonance supplied by heterosexual self-loathing are the only things I really miss in Barthes, too.
Heraclitus: to read him for the first time is like digging a hundred knives from the ground, nearly all of them still gleaming.
Kraus: too much spleen over sense, and Marx's fatal attraction for rhetorical chiasmus, which is always fake; only forms can be placed in such symmetries, never concepts. And to have affected Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's misogyny, of all their attributes—and this in a genuine lover of women.
Jabès: a great writer, but as an aphorist a queer cocktail of rabbinical proverbialism, French blur, and poetic overstatement. Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing self-evident about the aphorism at all. Within the form, the axiom and the crazy assertion are the same waste of breath.
La Bruyere: a lexicon of human prejudice. Still useful.
La Rochefoucauld: in an old Penguin Classic edition of his work, a superbly bad-tempered back-cover blurb used him to demolish a stupid contemporary critic. Any writer who can be set so easily to his own defense still earns our respect.
Leopardi: I wish we could suppress this adolescent habit of ours of automatically conferring genius upon even the latest of early deaths.
Lichtenberg: German concision? He deserves even more credit than we give him.
Nietszche: all his famous contradictions disappear as soon as you remember to read him as literature, which is not obliged to be coherent. Nevertheless, while I believe in an absolute separation in reading the life and the work, I find myself making a single, sentimental exception for lunacy in the philosophers, which still somehow discredits them.
Pascal: more and more he reads like Confucius, i.e., an axiomatic redundancy. This probably pays him the highest compliment; every discipline needs its Euclid.
Porchia: possibly the greatest, as almost no one has read him.
St. Thomas Gospel: the Nazarene Cynic laid bare, but somehow St. Thomas still comes out of it better.
Stevens: amateurism is generally a huge advantage to a poet, but this led him only to write the first half of his aphorisms. He omits the proof. For the true amateur the slightest literary obligation smacks of a journalistic deadline.
Valéry: if he has one fault, it is that you could always tell he composed his aphorisms horizontally. They taste a little too milky at times, a little too much of sleep.
Cioran: something like Nagarjuna's Western reincarnation. The Buddha, let's remember, required our skepticism; Cioran, possibly alone amongst European writers, refined it to attain a kind of terrible, insomniac enlightenment. Like Borges, he managed to turn a European tongue against itself to approach ideas that (unlike Pali, say) it had no right to—and somehow contrive their ghostly appearance, like the animated figures in a zootrope. To read him openly as a Westerner is thus to be a little reprogrammed. No wonder that he is considered, in this age of the pseudoscience, no philosopher, and absent from almost all contemporary accounts of the subject. He wrote only in obsolete genres. By comparison, everything else seems to be already haunted by its own critical refutation, immediately backed into punctilious consistency, supporting references, and an irrefutable (i.e., wholly circular) systematism before it has even begun to articulate its position.
Weil and Arendt's almost inadvertent dalliances apart, women have so far found very little use for the aphorism, far and away the most troubling indictment we can serve against any form.
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I no longer mean all of these. I meant them once. Some of them only once.
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Anything that elicits an immediate nod of recognition has only reconfirmed a prejudice.
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Whatever else, each aphorism also speaks death to the system. That is to say my creed, could such a thing exist.
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The more obscure the activity, the more certain the opinion of the critics. I would never have suspected the aphorism of having so many exact definitions . . .
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There is a makeweight of lies or conjecture in any statement longer than a sentence, longer than a breath, longer than that which can inhabit the present moment.
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A poem is a form of words that advertises its own significance; no more, no less. So with the aphorism, the difference being that all that exists of it is the advertisement.
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Of course you don't like all the aphorisms. I don't like all of you.
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To induce a horrific paralysis of boredom in the reader, in the compass of one sentence . . .
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Of course all these amount to nothing. Their collation might be my error; their aggregation, however, is yours.
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The lapidary coldness of the aphorism assuages a grief or a grievance far better than the poem. It erects a stone over each individual hurt.
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My new book arrived, and I had no idea who had written it. Or at least I now understood why I had written it: to expel the last man. Forgive the author of this book; but as you can see, I could live with him no longer.
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I would make her the Clodia, the Laura, the goddamn Beatrice of the aphorism. Now there was a gratitude I would have to explain to her.
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Why so many aphorisms on aphorisms? Only an ant can correct the manners of an ant.
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Fragments, indeed. As if there were anything to break.
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The aphorism is already a shadow of itself.
About the Author
Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1963. He works as a musician and editor, and teaches at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Landing Light, winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, and The White Lie: New and Selected Poetry. With Charles Simic, he edited the anthology New British Poetry. Paterson lives in St Andrews, Scotland.
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2008 by Don Paterson
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
