The aphorism, that snippet of wit and wisdom, is not a prose form I imagine many of us encounter regularly these days. It is primarily French in origin, with its most celebrated practitioner being the moralist François de La Rochefoucauld. I myself first encountered it through Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ill-health meant he could only focus long enough to put down a paragraph or two before needing to cool his brains, and who was happy to take any influence provided it wasn’t German. Both of these men are long dead; just as dead can the aphoristic form itself strike us as being.
An aphorism is a sentence or two, maybe at most a few paragraphs, on whatever takes the author’s fancy. They are philosophical, in that they are driven by ideas, but never system-building. If you wanted to build, you would write an essay, not scatter fragments like seeds. To write an aphorism, you must typically believe against something. In Theodor Adorno (in Minima Moralia) or Nietzsche’s cases, this “against” is a dislike for significant portions of the world they lived in. In the case of the French-language Romanian thinker Emil Cioran, it’s a dislike of nearly all the world he lived in, indeed of life itself. The typical impression of an aphorism is of witnessing someone engaged in a futile conflict with a great edifice, an elegant swordsman stabbing at the cold stone of castle walls.
Prejudice is often necessary to the aphorism, and it is precisely this which makes the form seem challenging to imagine writing today. An infamous one by Nietzsche, “You go to women – do not forget the whip”, provides an example. On the one hand, it conveys succinctly the importance of power dynamics for Nietzsche to his reader, but on the other it is reliant upon a (male) reader who is happy to take sexist ideas without question. The more prejudices we attempt today to dissolve – on race, gender, nation – the more we lose that centre of common understanding which an aphorism can work with. Nietzsche may dislike much of the modern world, but he needs it there to make his points. The best aphorisms are short, but brevity is enabled by us being able to recognise the world, the idea, for ourselves.
Prejudice and the absence of a system are not the only things that are needful to the aphorist. The most important is an overwhelming sense of one’s own importance and, of course, correctness. We shouldn’t underestimate how rare this actually is. Writers, especially of fiction, are uniquely predisposed to consider themselves great geniuses – but they are also typically wracked with self-doubts. In the case of fiction a creator typically believes in the merits of each work as a whole, rather than every aspect of it. Philosophers and other thinkers may likewise be utterly convinced that their key ideas are right, yet ready to deny themselves the megalomania that sees their every thought as being worthy of a crown of laurels.
For the aphorist, it is not so. Your ideas in your aphorisms range widely, and you must believe each one to be totally correct and worth sharing. In other words, you must be willing to assert to yourself and the world that you are a polymath, a rare genius. Such arrogance is another reason why few aphoristic books are being written and published today – the people truly arrogant enough to produce such a book are too busy in politics or leading large companies. This is why, to a certain extent, for the modern aphorism, we should look to social media, because it is here that we hear the select thoughts of those who believe the entire universe needs to hear them, compressed into the shortform.
We need arrogance because to doubt, for an aphorist, is fatal. Since an aphorism rarely has time to give examples, let alone argue, it works by the beauty of its prose and the power of its emotions to persuade us to its view. (“Logic and sermons never convince, / The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul” wrote Walt Whitman, whose poems are often filled with aphoristic little moments.) Since this is the case, to show doubt is to undermine everything you write – if you doubt, the reader will have cause to also. Regardless of the arrogance noted above, the aphorists I have read seem to be human, and no freer ultimately from self-questioning than the rest of us. Not showing it, then, is the thing.
This tension between feeling and revealing becomes part of the excitement of reading aphorisms. I think one of the best ways into reading someone like Cioran or Nietzsche is to think of their works as collectively constituting a work of fiction, complete with a highly opinionated narrative voice trying to get our attention and our trust. One of our goals becomes, as it is when we read fiction, the analysis of this narrative voice, the pinning down of its consistencies and inconsistencies, and identifying those moments when it seems to be hiding something from us that may yet prove essential. In many cases we can read a book of aphorisms looking for the gaps between the mask and the man – and it is normally a man – and not feel our time has been entirely wasted.
All of the above is a kind of defence of the aphorism and its writer. But this does not, really, get us any closer to reading or enjoying reading the things. Here I can only speak for myself, those things I noticed that helped me in a recent attempt at this.
The experience of reading a book of aphorisms is strange because it neither asks us to keep a thread of argument in mind, as does a typical non-fiction work, nor asks us to remember characters and stories as does a work of fiction. Yet memory is vital to the aphorism. “There are some words that hit like hammers. But others / You swallow like hooks and swim on and yet do not know it.” We ought to replace Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “words” with “aphorisms” to get an idea of the role of memory in reading aphorisms. We must read to remember. The startling thing, for me, when I read Cioran, or even Nietzsche (a writer I much prefer), is how so many of the aphorisms do nothing for me. I read them and shrug to myself. But if we remember them, they will return to us, and if they are good aphorisms they will return to us at precisely that moment when they can best reveal their value and hidden truth to us. To someone in the habit of letting the words one reads leave their head as soon as they move onto the next sentence there’s almost no point reading the aphorisms at all.
To say that we have to read to remember hints at the importance we need to place in ourselves as readers. Just as the aphorist cannot show doubt, the reader of aphorisms must believe she will one day be receptive to them. The faith, the confidence, must be on both sides. To give up a book of aphorisms as we may give up a novel damns us as much as it damns the aphorist, for in doing this we say, in effect, that we believe we will never have the right frame of mind, that we are incapable of the receptivity needed for appreciating what is in front of us. That we are fixed, and dull, and heavy of spirit.
Such were my thoughts, anyway, as I wondered whether to write about Emil Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born. I finished it last week, and had thought it would get no blog post. There was too little underlining, too few thoughts of my own to work with. That strange aphoristic rhythm – where we read page after page before suddenly gasping at something of beauty, or wit, or profundity – was not doing anything for me. Cioran, who has found a posthumous popularity among the anti-natalist community, (“Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one’s reach”), is relentlessly negative in a way that I try to avoid adopting for myself.
Only occasionally would I reach for my pencil. “No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive” – certainly a silly view, but one well expressed. At one point he describes mankind as “fidget[ing] as if he were on the threshold of an astonishing career.” These things we can respect for their imagery, even as we chuckle from beyond the margin. (Just as Adorno wrote that there can be “no right life in the wrong”, there can be no good aphorism in wrong prose.)
Other moments required more consideration at my end. “There is no ‘ecstasy’ which either memory or imagination can resuscitate!” seems frightening in its implications about the value of our moments, and for that reason worth carrying about, seeking in life the evidence that may one day disprove it. “The jealousy of the gods survives their disappearance” is another good example of something that works for me. Even if there are no gods, nor ever were, such a phrase by its mystery makes me wonder about their value in trying to explain something about the world I live in. Just flicking through the book now, I have come across another thing to note, as if to prove my point about needing to find the right time, the right inner receptivity, for what at another moment may be so many dead words. (What a relief to find something I wrote at the beginning of this post makes sense, at least for my own case…) The aphorism in question: “Every friendship is an inconspicuous drama, a series of subtle wounds.” Here, it’s less a question of whether I agree, but whether this provokes something. Perhaps that’s another good way of looking at an aphorism – each successful one seems to carry in itself the seed of any number of novels.
Perhaps the hardest thing about aphorisms is writing about them. They ought to speak for themselves. At school I might be given one and told to go away and write 1,500 words, the length of a short blog post on this website. But to write, as I normally do, a few paragraphs on each of the above, would make me look like an idiot. (This result may occur by accident at other times, but is not the intention of the blog.) I trust readers to know how to unpack the obvious meanings of a saying. And as for the deeper meanings, the ones that come out of the wound an aphorism leaves in us – these are too personal for me to share, and I imagine are just the same for you too.
They are strange things, aphorisms. These sentences of prejudice, arrogance, at times barely-concealed anxiousness, sometimes resonating, sometimes aggravating, sometimes doing nothing at all. I wrote the first part of this post in an attempt to make myself believe the time I spent with Cioran (not the first, because I read A Short History of Decay a few years ago) was not wasted, and with the magic that is granted me as your blogger, I somehow succeeded. Reflection added meanings, brought a certain sense to stacks of nonsense. Cioran himself writes of his form: “An Aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.” This is a deliberate silliness, one we shouldn’t take too seriously. A mask, a play, an act.
We don’t read such things to become warm. As Kafka wrote of good books, they must “be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” Aphorisms are for when we are cold. They are the prick of pain that tells us we’re alive, and we must keep a store of them inside us, just in case the ice is ever at risk of getting too thick.