Edith Wharton – The Age of Innocence

So much of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence is perfectly done that to write about it in a blog post becomes very difficult – it truly provides an embarrassment of novelistic riches. Such books are a blessing to a reader but a beast for the blogger. There is too much for me to say, even after a single (re)reading. Each word is a thread that can be followed, rather than merely plucked. Everything from flowers, to place (New York City), time (1870s), society, location, and language, works meaningfully to make this a supremely rewarding work for the analytical reader. And Wharton does all this with a prose that is clear and a story whose mysteries linger long after we finish it.

If I try to summarise it overmuch, the story might collapse into a mixture of predictability and familiarity. It is a question of the obligations owed to love in a restrictive society. Newland Archer, a marriageable young man of elevated social standing, gets engaged to May Welland, a pretty young lady from a good family who is ready for her husband to tell her what to do and who to be. Before the wedding, however, Countess Ellen Olenska, May’s cousin and an old friend of Newland, returns to New York from the Old World without her husband. Older, wiser, ignorant of the finer rules of New York society, Newland finds himself falling quickly in love with Olenska. But New York is a powerful force within the novel, and Newland is “at heart a dilettante”. We wonder whether he has the strength to choose, or whether that choice will be made entirely for him.

With so many themes and ideas to select from, the one that strikes me as the best way into the novel is that of perspective. “Age” is in the title of The Age of Innocence, and while this might refer to either Newland or May at their stage of life, it also refers to their time as a whole. Furthermore, it can only refer to their time when we have the wisdom to look back from a time when that innocence is no longer present. It implies a multiple perspective. This multiplicity concerns the whole novel, which we can read differently, depending on how closely we wish to stick to Newland’s perspective. If we decide to step back, as I think the novel would like us to, then it moves beyond being a simple work of frustrated love and weak men and allows for a far more nuanced view.

Viewing

The narrator follows Newland throughout The Age of Innocence, with only occasional moments when they step back to give a kind of “society view” through reference to things like “the daily press” on the novel’s first page, or to the welter of names we as readers have to get used to. Indeed, one reason The Age of Innocence feels like a society novel is because there are so many people milling about that I began to suspect that Wharton’s intention was that I struggled to keep track of them all. Indeed, I soon began treating them abstractly in my head as “important” or “unimportant”, just as those same characters would judge those around them. Newland, our hero, is just another member of this mass when the book begins, and it is only as it progresses that he begins to find himself being able to view it from his own perspective.

This sense of massed perspective is established in the first scene, where we are present at an opera performance. To one on the stage there is only a mass of eyes staring down, undifferentiated, and Newland is up there among them. The opera is not so important, because it is Newland’s gaze we are interested in, emphasised by the repeated looking words like “contemplated,” “scanned”, and so on. Indeed, because he spends much time staring at May across the hall, we might notice and smile at the thought that her presence in her box is every bit a work of performance as is that of the person on the stage, something that becomes clearer and clearer as we learn about the New York of the 1870s over the course of the book. Newland does not actually do anything here, really, except look. This preference for observation over action proves one of the most distinctive elements of his character.

This early scene also introduces us to one side of the dynamic between May and Ellen, a comparison that exists in Newland’s perspective and develops as he observes both women. There’s a striking paragraph here which sets out his view on May and explains quite clearly why Ellen may prove alluring:

“He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a simpleton. He meant her (thanks to his enlightening companionship) to develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own with the most popular married women of the “younger set,” in which it was the recognized custom to attract masculine homage while playfully discouraging it.”

This is funny, albeit in a terrible way. Look at the verbs – “wish”, “meant”, “develop”, “enabling” – each and every one of them looks to the future and presumes May has nothing to value now except her beautiful emptiness, her state as a blank canvas. Indeed, “Mrs Newland Archer” annihilates the name of his wife and thereby makes it clear how substitutable Newland must view this person as being. This is Newland’s view of May, and really, it does not change much as the novel progresses. He comes to contrast it mentally with Ellen, who has a history through her failed marriage. Unlike with May, whom Newland believes he must form, (hence requiring effort, something mildly distasteful to the dilettante, however pleasurable the reward), the temptation of Countess Olenska comes from the opportunity to discover a fully-formed personality. Since she thinks for herself, she is unknowable in the way that Newland believes May never could be.

Flowers

The constant presence of flowers within the novel both expands this comparison while also deepening it. Newland sends May lilies-of-the-valley every day, an action whose regularity (though it is not done by standing order) seems to predict the very predictability and conventionality of their married life. After reconnecting with Ellen, Newland finds himself in a flower shop, where his eyes land upon some yellow roses. “Too rich, too strong, in their fiery beauty” – rather than send them to his betrothed, Newland sends them to Ellen. Ellen receives flowers from many admirers, and her display of them – scattered here and there in her house, rather than kept orderly – is taken by society as yet another mark against her personality, a reminder of the disorderliness of the woman who has failed her husband by separating from him. The orderliness of May’s flowers contrasts with the personality of Ellen’s to evidence the seeming accuracy of Newland’s judgements of the two women.

Yet the flowers are not just a prop of this sort. Nor even does their importance cease at the obvious symbolic readings we can find in them – wastefulness, fragile youth, and so on. It is with flowers that we see, perhaps most obviously, some of the limitations of Newland’s perspective. Newland purchases the yellow roses he sends to Ellen “almost without knowing what he did.” Indeed, that Newland continues sending flowers to her at further points of the story is only brought to our attention after the fact some hundred pages later. It is as if the prose is conspiring to hide from Newland and the reader the fact that is increasingly obvious to anyone but him – the extent to which he loves Ellen. Newland might be discovering a life beyond society’s rules, but the yellow roses provide a potent symbol of the fact that in both cases he is carried by forces beyond his control – society in the first case, his subconscious in the second.

New York

New York dominates the novel – it is mentioned on near-enough every page. It is a totality, or at least seems to be. Yet this, too, is only a perspective that the novel seeks to shake. When May’s family go for a holiday to Florida, her father insists on trying to remake a little section of New York in their lodgings there. This is patently ridiculous – it makes New York look silly, shows how silly it is when removed from the environment that protects it. At the same time, it shows how important that environment was – how protective, to its inhabitants. When Ellen and Archer meet privately, it almost requires them to be somewhere else – a carriage or country estate, for example. In terms of the novel’s perspectives, one thing we might take from this is that New York’s restrictiveness actually works successfully to control everyone, so long as they are there. To me, the climax of the novel is when Newland tries to say goodbye to Ellen before she heads back to Europe, only to find that New York, in the figure of May, has already arranged for her to travel in a friend’s carriage. 

Limitations

We see through Newland’s eyes. We see the frustration of his life in New York, once he wants what it cannot give him. But just as we saw with the flowers, he is limited. Even the most powerful image of the book reveals that limitation: “He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?” Striking, but even when he thinks outside the system of his city, Newland is still taking the image from another, not quite thinking for himself.

We think May is like this, because Newland repeatedly considers her so – a mere “type”, absent of agency. But the novel’s penultimate chapter, where May sends off her rival without ever openly acknowledging it, is startling because it is here where, after noticing the importance of perspective as we read, Wharton makes it clear that we’ve only seen a fragment of the whole. May, her eyes “wet with victory” in the undeclared battle, has indeed acted independently to surprise Newland with the personality he hadn’t supposed she had. Even though that personality’s distinguishing characteristic is to ally itself with the existing powers of New York, it is still much more a something than the nothing he assumed. Hence his failure to achieve the conclusion with Ellen that he had hoped for.

The Final Chapter

In its final chapter, The Age of Innocence leaves us with a kind of mystery to ponder. I first read the novel over ten years ago now, and all I remembered in the years since was that the ending had left me feeling that there was something strange going on. That may well have been my total inexperience of romance, which meant I had no way of understanding Newland’s actions. Taking place nearly thirty years after the main events of the novel, this epilogue shows the consequences of Newland’s choice – if choice it quite was – of May over Ellen. He has achieved the worldly success that sticking in his place in society promised him, including professional recognition and beautiful children. He has also, in a way, come to terms with his life. “It did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty.”

After May’s passing Newland’s son takes him to Paris. It is here that Ellen now lives. She sends a note to the Archers’ hotel when she learns of their arrival, inviting them both to her, but on the street the father hesitates, in the end only his son goes upstairs to her rooms. “It’s more real to me here than if I went up”, is how he puts it to himself. And then he goes back to his hotel.

Young Angus could not understand him. Older Angus, perhaps, can take a slightly more appreciative view. But still, it’s another moment where the novel seems to be doing something with perspective that’s not at all clear. We’ve gone through the whole of The Age of Innocence watching Newland and Ellen restraining themselves, making sacrifices for the good of a society that neither quite likes nor believes in. That society has done nothing to commend itself to us. Now, both of them are free to be together, free of that society, but even now, Newland still chooses to remain with a memory, rather than a reality.

It is perhaps some comment on human desires. The way that we want until the moment we have. Perhaps Newland, whose first recorded thoughts about May in the book use the distinctive word “possessorship”, has decided that having something real is no longer worth the trouble. Better to enjoy the dream, undiminished. The next generation are much freer than he and Ellen had been – his son is an architect, a profession that would not have been acceptable in Newland’s youth for a man of his background. By choosing not to see Ellen, I suppose we can say that Newland is choosing to protect the idea of his life, even with its bad parts, as having been the right choice. Perhaps this sense of justification is fragile enough that meeting the countess might throw him off course. 

Perhaps the restrictions of the past – the absence of the telephone or relatively rapid transatlantic crossings – meant a heightened receptivity to what ultimately was perceived. The glance felt across the room back then was more keenly felt than the softest press of lip on lip is today. I don’t know; the novel does not know either. Newland’s justification seems rooted in fear. The novel’s portrayal of his world is too negative to redeem at the last moment. May may surprise Newland, and indeed us readers, when she steps up to ensure she gets her marriage and the life she wants, but her perspective is not enough to save the society. I came out of the book marvelling at its technical proficiency, which truly is worth studying; yet after writing this blog post, I’m marvelling also at this mystery, which still remains so to me, of what exactly it seems to want to say.

I suppose I’ll keep pondering these questions until the next time I return to it. 

Making a Mystery – Conrad’s Lord Jim

Lord Jim is the novel where Joseph Conrad’s ingenuity of construction and technique come together most spectacularly in service of creating an atmosphere of mystery. A simple work in story, it tells the tale of a man who, having once lost his honour, cannot live down this fact, and instead chooses always and ever to flee it. Upon this simple foundation Conrad builds a formidable sense of psychological depth for its main character with his prose, so that even as the story becomes no more complex than this, its main character himself never quite comes to bore us.

At the same time, to me the novel is also one of Conrad’s clearest failures. Having created a masterful atmosphere, a wondrous fog of mystery, Conrad shines a torch on it in the later sections of the work and devalues much of the power of the world he had made. Be that as it may, the creation is what is interesting, and it is this that I propose to discuss here today.

A Body as much as a Mind

“He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler’s water-clerk he was very popular.”

What an opening! We must really imagine this for a moment. Out of the void of the first page we suddenly have a figure coming straight for us – you want to leap out of the way before it’s too late, like those people encountering the first moving pictures of oncoming trains. With Jim like a “bull” we have a sense of latent violence, of danger. But then “dogged” comes along and contains this opposite: we think of a much smaller animal, so that this initial violence is immediately tempered by uncertainty – is there “nothing aggressive” in it after all? Such initial ambiguities are only heightened by words like “seemed”, “apparently.” Here we have all that we will come to recognise as Jim – an impression and an uncertainty, mixing together. Yet before all this, we have a body. For it is as a body that Conrad creates Jim as a real figure. We see him, from the first sentence, as a physical thing – we know how he walks, where he has been, how he is dressed.

Without such solidity of body, speculating on a personality feels like cheating – it’s as dull as a friend gossiping about someone you do not know. Throughout Lord Jim, Jim himself is a bodily presence just as his mind is an absence. Apart from the first twenty-or-so pages, the novel is narrated by the sailor and gentleman Charles Marlow, whom we might know as the narrator of Heart of Darkness (among other stories). This adds a powerful limitation to the narrative’s range by keeping us behind his eyes, within his knowledge, until this finally becomes stretched unfairly near the end of the work. While Marlow thinks he knows Jim’s heart, he certainly knows him as a presence: “A feeble burst of many voices mingled with the tinkle of silver and glass floated up from the dining-room below; through the open door the outer edge of the light from my candle fell on his back faintly; beyond all was black; he stood on the brink of a vast obscurity, like a lonely figure by the shore of a sombre and hopeless ocean.”

We see Jim here, as a body in the world. Marlow has to see him thus, or he would have nobody to talk about. But we see his back – the physical representation of the distance between his heart and ourselves. At the final time Marlow sees him, we also see Jim as a body without seeing inside him: “The twilight was ebbing fast from the sky above his head, the strip of sand had sunk already under his feet, he himself appeared no bigger than a child—then only a speck, a tiny white speck, that seemed to catch all the light left in a darkened world. . . . And, suddenly, I lost him. . . .” As descriptions, they do a thing that is by no means easy – they frustrate our desire for complete knowledge without being unfair. They say that just as with a real person, we can know Jim as a presence without fully knowing him as a spirit. They force upon us the duty of interpretation – we must try to piece together the scraps of a soul to match this bodily outline.

Interpreting a limited material

This disjunction between revealed body and hidden mind is certainly one way Lord Jim creates its mystery and encourages interpreting it. Another is that it foregrounds interpreting as a general condition of life almost from the very start, through Jim’s time in court. Jim’s great crime, his original sin, is to have been first mate on the “Patna” and to have acted in dereliction of his duty: he abandons its passengers, pilgrims heading to Mecca, together with a few other members of the Patna’s crew, after the ship appears to have sustained critical damage while at sea. “I had jumped… it seems.” Our first view of him through Marlow’s eyes is when he is already in the dock being tried. Jim is trying to “tell honestly the truth of his experience”, while the court is after facts. But the narrator despairs: “as if facts could explain anything!” The contrast of the bureaucratic, fact-finding, courtroom language with the complex descriptions and uncertainties of Jim’s experience is the first clue that interpretation is central to the novel.

Or perhaps not, because Jim himself is an inveterate interpreter too: “He loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality.” He is, as another character remarks, a “Romantic.” Unlike the other characters, there’s evidence that Jim engages in that most dangerous of occupations – reading. It is for this reason that there’s such a gap between his idea of himself and the cowardly (or human) reality that he demonstrates when tested in the Patna case. It is Jim’s horror at his own self that leads him to constantly flee the positions that Marlow arranges for him in various places around South East Asia, before finally ending up in the remote village of Patusan, far away from anyone who might know his shame at his one staining moment of weakness.

The court interprets in search of facts, Jim interprets in search of heroism, but Marlow does his own interpreting too. Marlow sits and tells a story after dinner. It is dark, but the other figures create the sense of a community, a class, of which Marlow is both merely a representative and a critical voice. Marlow’s interest in Jim comes from his recognition of Jim as also “one of us” – a phrase repeated, over and over, in the novel. “Perhaps, unconsciously, I hoped I would find that something, some profound and redeeming cause, some merciful explanation, some convincing shadow of an excuse.” Jim is a gentleman, well-bred, well-spoken, and in a trust-based world like that of shipping, he has not only disappointed himself, he has also shamed his people – Marlow included.

The sense that Jim’s crime is touches all within this group is emphasised by the way that Marlow lets others speak of it and share their own view of it. There’s a Captain Brierly, whose passages in chapter VI are a perfect story in themselves. This man, who has the proven heroism of having saved lives at sea to his name, is part of the three men judging Jim’s case. “Why are we tormenting that young chap?” He asks Marlow between sessions. Jim’s guilt so challenges his world that Brierly jumps overboard a few weeks after the trial is concluded. There is also a Frenchman that Marlow meets in Sydney, who was crew of a gunboat that discovered the Patna, floating aimlessly with its white crew absconded. Hence the story that Jim tells is added to, changed, challenged, by the others that Marlow encounters.

The most interesting, from the perspective of the narrative, is the character of Chester, a West Australian who plans a scheme for extracting a significant amount of guano in a dangerous region of the ocean. He correctly identifies Jim as someone down on his luck who may see the offer of a risky and remunerative trip to the to a guano island as a way out, and tries to persuade Marlow over to his view. It does not work – Marlow has taken it upon himself to sort Jim’s destiny out, perhaps in the hope of saving his whole people the shame. Angry, Chester retorts: “Oh! You are devilish smart… but you are like the rest of them. Too much in the clouds. See what you will do with him.”

Two things are interesting in this moment. The first is that it is an attack on our narrator. Marlow is an active participant in Lord Jim, not a passive spinner of yarns. He catches Jim immediately after the trial, helps him get jobs across South East Asia. We expect him to be benevolent, and he is not maliciously “unreliable” in the way that some narrators are. We might recognise that his own interest is driven by a murky set of elements, including his desire that Jim not let “us” down, but we largely trust him. By having Marlow be challenged so directly, readers now also have to judge him not just as a narrator, but as an actor too. In other words, through challenging Marlow, Conrad makes it clear to readers that they should be engaging in judging him too. We must interpret our interpreter.

The second interesting thing here is that it is a clear example of a branching path in the story. Conrad is a writer we generally associate with a deterministic view of life, of dark fates leading to inevitable demises. Marlow’s judgement of Chester is correct – the expedition to the guano island most likely leads to the deaths of everyone involved following the passage through the region of a hurricane – but that means it is fatal, but not fatalistic. For once Conrad seems to be suggesting there was another option for his story. That every moment contains a choice is a truism. That Jim made the choice to jump and that this has cursed his life is a central fact of Lord Jim. But what Jim does afterwards is up to him, though his character naturally plays a significant role in determining what he does.

We cannot choose without a sense of options, and here we have an option provided directly – Jim could follow Marlow’s advice, or he could follow Chester’s idea. The story could be otherwise – it is open. By doing this, perhaps unintentionally, Conrad is furthering the idea of being critical towards Marlow. If Marlow were merely good or bad we might give him no further thought, but if there’s an alternative offered, readers can actively consider which one is best. It is another impulse towards involvement, created through Conrad’s technique.

Further makers of mystery

I have read almost everything in Conrad’s major works now, have read his letters, have re-read much, including Lord Jim itself. Some aspects of his style are now more transparent to me than they would be to someone encountering him for the first time. He is extremely reliant on tripartite descriptions, on weighing down nouns with barnacle-like adjectives, on abusing the thesaurus for synonyms for “unclear”. He brings in a view of a fallen world not subtly, but through countless references to devilry, the infernal, and downward movement. In the same way he suggests a rigidity of destiny through his regular references to fate. His primary sources of reference are biblical. At least some of the turgidity of his prose comes from the heaviness of the adjectives and the occasional bad English (words or phrases directly translated French or Polish). When read with the right frame of mind, however, all these features of his language become another source of atmospheric murk and hence of mystery.

Just as Conrad’s prose makes the mystery, so too does his use of languages. The Frenchman mentioned earlier speaks partly in French, just as the central figure among Marlow’s advisors, Stein, speaks in an English brutalised into something half-German: “It is not good for you to find you cannot make your dream come true, for the reason that you not strong enough are, or not clever enough. Ja!” His advice for Jim: “In the destructive element immerse… that was the way. To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream…” The idea of this blog post has been that Conrad builds a mystery in the novel by showering us in interpretations and forcing interpretation upon us. Such phrases as these from Stein, comprehensible yet not quite clear, serve this purpose also. They are not only memorable for their unique phrasing, they are also just vague enough to force us into reflection. What exactly does this mean?

The actual language of the novel, the light and dark, the fog, all of the adjectives, is perhaps less interesting once you have read enough of it. It creates a mood of mystery, rather than being itself mysterious. “The views he let me have of himself were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog.” Like the images of Jim with his back turned, or pacing, or whatever, they tell us we cannot know him – but we, stubborn, if we are in a good mood and are willing to give the story its due, try regardless.

Conclusion

The story its due… Well, Jim’s first half is up there with Heart of Darkness, and indeed the two works were written near-simultaneously, but as soon as the action moves to Patusan and Jim becomes a kind of ruler there, everything falls apart in my eyes. (And in that of many critics.) Conrad’s characterisation of the native population is less well done than of the Europeans, Marlow’s narration becomes more reliant on what he has not witnessed, which simplifies the interpretative layering, and an external figure is introduced to resolve Jim’s ambiguities by bringing the story to a violent and silly, however real the sources are, conclusion.

On the final page Marlow asks: “Is he satisfied—quite, now, I wonder?” But this would be just as appropriate a remark to be made as Marlow retreats from Patusan after his one and only visit, watching Jim shrinking by the shore… some hundred pages before the novel actually ends. To me, Lord Jim is not a “Romance”. It is a mystery of a single man’s soul. Therefore, what deepens that mystery improves the book, while what takes it away diminishes it. The last third of the novel is therefore its unravelling and could be removed without harm.

Still, the ravelling is brilliant. When Lord Jim is at its best every word, every sentence, serves to create a sense of depth and mystery around its central character. It’s humbling, and shocking, how simple the story actually is. A man jumps from a boat, mistakenly thinking it is sinking. He is tried and banned from working as a sailor again. A fellow gentleman aids him in finding new work, which he flees each time his past is remembered. Eventually he ends up on an island where nobody knows his past, and he gets the chance to recreate himself. This works, for a time, until a figure from the outside world comes to break the illusion.

It’s a story we could tell in thirty pages, not three hundred. Even psychologically, Jim is not that complicated. But we see him as from a chair in a dark room, with his back to us as he stares into a moonlit night, and Conrad creates thereby something more than a man – a symbol, a mystery, a ghost to haunt us. Regardless of whether we ultimately like the work, in terms of the writing there is so much deserving of wonder.

How to Read an Aphorism

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.