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.
Others have written about the aphorism at greater length, including Andrew Hui, who usefully distinguishes the aphorism from the proverb (a traditional, accepted truth), the epigram (an expression of sarcastic wit), and the maxim (a pithy moral edict). The aphorism is more elusive and more philosophical: a brief statement that demands interpretation.
Hui’s credible theory is that “aphorisms are before, against, and after philosophy.”
Heraclitus comes before and against Plato and Aristotle, Pascal after and against Descartes, Nietzsche after and against Kant and Hegel. The philosopher creates and critiques continuous lines of argument. The aphorist, on the other hand, composes scattered lines of intuition.
Hui traces the aphoristic mode from the Analects of Confucius—dismissed by Hegel as too fragmentary—through the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas to Erasmus and Bacon, Pascal, and Nietzsche. His theme: the aphorism as a form devoted to the hidden, the infinite or indefinite, the discontinuous, and the unfinished. The aphorism is opposed to system, theory, structure.
Perhaps the best book of aphorisms I have read this year is an anomalous one, since it’s also a memoir. What it shares with the more traditional aphorism is a pattern of brief, elusive insights, and a refusal of discernible order. What it subtracts is impersonality, the traditional preserve of the aphorist.
Jesse Ball’s Autoportrait is a chaos of sentences, composed in a single long paragraph in the course of a single day. Its opening remark:
To my knowledge, I have never ridden a horse.
Among the “aphorisms”:
My friend and I were maybe ten and we had a basket of fries in front of us. There were just so many fries. I was looking at them and thinking—this fry-eating thing is not going to end anytime soon.
Perhaps you won’t agree that there’s an aphorism here, but I am pretty sure there is, even if extracting it is left as an exercise for the reader: DIY.
Another sentence, in which the aphorism’s closer to the surface:
I do not agree with The New York Times that willpower is finite and there is really nothing you can do but succumb to the capitalistic spirit of the age.
Autoportrait veers into more personal terrain, as when the author considers turning off his brother’s life support; and there are stretches of narrative that last for half a page or more. It ends predictably, but beautifully, with a moment of both attention and oblivion to life’s sublime particularity:
Once in Gardur, I came out of a building with my wife and the sky was full of turning birds. There were thousands of them, thousands in a single flock and turning and turning in the sky. I looked around in absolute prostration—absolutely flattened in my heart and life by the enormity of what I was seeing, and I realized that there were people in the street going back and forth in the face of this spectacle, and to them it meant nothing. They could not even see it.
The aphorism here is better left unsaid: if it was made explicit, it wouldn’t be an aphorism, but a proverb or a maxim. In being hidden it becomes, or feels, more aphoristic.
I wish I could write in fluent aphorisms. Not that I’d do it all the time, but it would be a useful register in which to work against the over-theorization of human life. I tried again in this TLS piece about philosophy and form:
In the best personal essays, what is idiosyncratic speaks for everyone; in great philosophy it’s the other way around.
Perhaps, with effort, I could learn to aphorize more consistently. Teachers these days favour a “growth mindset” that sees talent as the product of diligent application over a “fixed mindset” that sees it as innate. I am sure they are right and I follow in their footsteps when I teach. But I find it hard to make the shift myself.
I have tried to develop a growth mindset—but I think it’s something you are born with.