I like aphorisms, and aphoristic writing. I don’t care to sit down and craft independent ones, but I would like it if one occasionally cropped up in my own writings. I’m not sure how to go about making that happen, if there’s a way of doing so intentionally it continues to escape me. (Same with metaphor, something I admire about M. Montaigne is how metaphor naturally flows from his pen, to the point where he surely must be constructing his essays on the basis of them, even his mental models of how the world works. How does one get there from here?)
I figured it wouldn’t hurt to at least immerse myself in aphorisms, so I bought copies of The Oxford Book of Aphorisms and The Viking Book of Aphorisms (the latter selected by W.H. Auden, of all people), and two books by James Geary, The World in a Phrase: a Brief History of the Aphorism and Geary’s Guide to the World’s Greatest Aphorists. The second of those is just a collection like the others, but The World in a Phrase tries at length to explain what qualifies as an aphorism and how they work, which I found helpful. In an NPR interview,
Geary tells Robert Siegel that he has five laws: “It must be brief. It must be definitive. It must be personal — that’s the difference between an aphorism and a proverb. It must be philosophical — that’s the difference between an aphorism and a platitude, which is not philosophical,” he says. “And the fifth law is it must have a twist. And that can be either a linguistic twist or a psychological twist or even a twist in logic that somehow flips the reader into a totally unexpected place.”
Can you somehow apply those principles to deliberately craft aphorisms? I don’t know, but there are many in history who are known primarily for crafting them, even publishing books of them. Nassim Nicholas Taleb did the same more recently, in his The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms. Well worth reading, but hard to sustain a high level of quality over 208 pages. Still, many are quotable and several are profound
People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than in what you are trying to hide.
Pharmaceutical companies are better at inventing diseases that match existing drugs, rather than inventing drugs to match existing diseases.
Ted Gioia once shared some of his aphorisms regarding music. They’re good!
Choosing your favorite musicians is like getting to pick your own parents. In a very real way you are now one of their descendants.
Long before the Internet, music served as a kind of cloud storage used by societies to preserve their most important information. Every knowledge vocation—medicine, ministry, philosophy, law, history, etc.—was originally practiced by musicians. When we treat songs as mere entertainment, we lose not only these traditions but much of music’s inherent power.
If your music isn’t changing your life, you’ve simply picked the wrong songs.
A song is like the fish and loaves in the miracle story—everyone who hears it can keep it, and it’s still there for the next person.
What a great gift music is: It gives us satisfaction even before we’re born, soothing us as we listen to the rhythm of our mother’s heartbeat, and it’s one of the few joys we can still experience in our final days.
Philosophers treat music as a kind of aesthetic experience, but it’s more a physiological force. Long before a song impacts our ideas, it has already changed our bodies.
If I only get to bring one recording to a desert island, the lyrics better be about how to make a boat.