The Brink of Idiocy

When I joined Twitter in September 2016, I set myself the modest goal of posting a witty aphorism once a week. I managed precisely one:

When I feel like an academic fraud, I tell myself it’s imposter syndrome. But then I think, what do I know about imposter syndrome?

Composing an effective aphorism is no joke. Poets do it, sometimes. Many of the poems in Elisa Gabbert’s new collection, Normal Distance, are in effect sequential aphorisms. And the poet Jim Richardson is a master of the form. From Vectors, a terse confutation of the Golden Rule:

God help my neighbors if I loved them as I love myself.

I don’t know if Richardson was aware of Simone Weil’s book, Gravity and Grace, but he might be responding to her:

To love a stranger as oneself implies the reverse: to love oneself as a stranger.

In writing about the aphorism, it’s tempting to be aphoristic, like Brian Dillon in this terrific short essay:

Condemned to concision, the aphoristic imagination teeters constantly on the brink of idiocy.

…