an aphorism is a brief waste of time

8/8/2019 An Aphorism is a Brief Waste of Time

1/5

The aphorism is a brief waste of time

(2004)

The aphorism has fallen so badly out of favour that even the word itself now

seems to present people with difficulties. After a reading the other week, a

girl told me how much she was "looking forward to my euphemisms". A

colleague of mine persistently referred to them as "amorphisms", which I had

taken as some kind of witty comment on their pointlessness, until I realised he

was just saying it wrong.

Like many writers, I pass my time in a state of guilt-ridden paralysis. I emerge

from most days with nothing to show for my efforts but 40 e-mails, a dead leg

and an empty box of Solpadeine. Sometimes the only vestige of self-worth you

can take to bed with you is the fact that you have held strong and managed not

to watch Trisha again. The aphorism, though, became a way of rescuing

something from the day. This hardly sounds like much of a reason for you to

read them, I know. But an aphorism is the result of a sudden momentary

conviction, and I have a lot of those. The truth of that conviction is neither here

nor there; nor is the fact that you might disagree with it five minutes later. Its

being wholly, blindingly certain of itself is pretty much its only virtue.

Most definitions of "aphorism" usually refer to a) their brevity and b) their being

a "statement of a truth". Actually, b) is rubbish and long overdue for revision. If

you sit down and read a lot of aphorisms, after your nose stops bleeding you will

also see how you were first struck by precisely their lack of truthfulness. For all

their variety, they make essentially the same gesture: they posit something odd,

even outrageous, something that you hadn't thought of before, and seek to prove

it in the same breath. Anything that has you nodding immediately in agreement

whether it's a newspaper leader, a sermon, an interview hasn't accomplished

much more than reconfirming or deepening a prejudice. Aphorisms are


2/5

supposed to do the opposite. They're supposed to make you go "No! Actually,

hang on Yes." More often, your response will be simply "No! Never!" but at

least now you can re-embrace your old, lazy and uninterrogated opinion as a

properly tested conviction.

Alas, the tone the aphorism has to adopt to provoke this reaction is enormously

irritating: one of absolute self-certainty. The aphorism talks to you as if you were

an idiot. This also makes them all sound rather generic, like the ravings of some

wee disenfranchised god, bellowing away in the abyss to no one in particular.

For that reason, you can recognise an aphorist by his obsessions, but not his style:

compared with the poet or the novelist, the voices of aphorists, from Heraclitus

to Paul Valry, are disturbingly interchangeable. (They are also all men. Hannah

Arendt and Simone Weil apart who were less aphorists than just highly

quotable writers women have found no real use for them, which is about the

most troubling indictment you can serve on anything.)

This tone of self-importance is a huge embarrassment in the Anglophone

tradition, which only really permits the all-knowing routine when it's Godspeaking. Beyond the covers of the Good Book, that imperious and wholly

impersonal tone only really occurs in the language of legislature, or that most

unfortunate of genres, "wisdom literature". So the aphorism tends to remind

people of either God, law lords, or horrors Jonathan Livingston Seagull. No

form is more stylistically hamstrung from the outset. Its underdog quality has

always appealed to me.

As a result of that embarrassment, though, the British have produced far more

wits than aphorists. Yes, we have Halifax, Hazlitt and Cyril Connolly, but not too

many others. Chesterton ("Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of the

gradations of their decay") is the best, the most acute and funny, but his


3/5

aphorisms generally occurred in the course of his essays. We're deeply

uncomfortable with the unilateral assertion of what is the case, because it sounds

so close to blasphemy. Hence Pseud's Corner a fine, even necessary institution,

but you're just as likely to end up there for the crime of certainty as outrageousaffectation. The Brits are much happier in the grubby, transgressive shadows of

the footnote, where so much of our best writing is done. Aphorisms being

grumpy affairs, you'd think such culturally ingrained self-hatred would make

the English ideal aphorists, but I guess you can be overqualified for the task. The

form, though, has always flourished on the continent, where the High Horse has

had a longer and nobler tradition. The Germans and the Austrians have

produced some wonderful aphorists, among them Lichtenberg, Schopenhauer,

Goethe, Nietzsche and Karl Kraus. But the French have always been the best.

Their language makes a fetish of its own elegance, and nowhere is elegance at

more of a premium than in the aphorism, where because time is tight - so much

more has to be suggested than stated. Pascal, the daddy of them; La Bruyre

still a wonderful, useful lexicon of human prejudice; then La Rochefoucauld,

Chamfort, Vauvenargues, Joubert all the way up to the otherworldly musings

of Paul Valry, Ren Char, the weird rabbinical proverbs of Edmond Jabes, andmy second-favourite, Jean Cocteau.

But the greatest aphorist of the 20th century was EM Cioran. His perennial

failure to be acclaimed as a sublime genius on a par with Joyce, Rilke or Borges is

a perfect mystery to everyone who has taken the trouble to read him properly.

His problem was that he worked in two of the least prestigious forms of the 20th

century the aphorism and the philosophical essay, and so usually escapessurveys of either literature or philosophy. Emil Cioran, who died in Paris in 1995,

was a Romanian who wrote in French and, perhaps alone among European

writers, refined his native Buddhist scepticism to a kind of terrible insomniac

enlightenment. To read him openly is to be a little reprogrammed, since he


4/5

continually turns a European tongue on mysteries it has no right, by tradition, to

approach in the first place, and somehow contrives their ghostly appearance.

"Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no

one's reach."

Misread, though, Cioran makes Beckett look like PG Wodehouse. Several young

men who failed to get the joke ended up leaping from tall buildings, taking his

advocacy of suicide as a good career move quite literally. While Cioran's French

was impeccable, his humour was unmistakably Balkan in its blackness, and thus

lost on anyone raised on a diet of Camus, Sartre and other existentialist chuckle-

bunnies. The weak should really be protected from Cioran. But what he does is

shock the reader into a brief moment of complete wakefulness, to the strange fact

of their being here.

The one undeniable advantage the aphorism has is its brevity. Whatever else you

might have against an aphorism, you can't seriously hold that it's wasted your

time, unlike that last rubbish novel you gave up on two-thirds through. So as

you'd expect, the aphorism regains a little popularity whenever time is short and

precious: no one ever sewed Thackeray into the lining of their greatcoat as they

marched off to the trenches, though hed have taken bullet well. It was Marcus

Aurelius or Pascal. Hardly surprising that in these insecure times the twitchy

comfort of the vade mecum is back in fashion again, albeit in the form of your

mobile phone, and that steady source of comforting inanity, the text-message.

Given this and the fact that data-overload and multi-tasking have reduced our

powers of sustained concentration to that of a lovesick guppy, the aphorism

might be ripe for a comeback.

Reading is a marvellous way to spend your time; but in terms of what will have

real consequences for our future time, our thought and conduct, we tend to be

limited to what we can remember we've read. More than anything, the aphorism


5/5

tries desperately hard to be memorable. (Of course, this is the aim of all writing,

but usually we make some attempt to conceal the desperation. Another reason

why aphorisms, when they fall, fall very hard indeed.) But perhaps they also

reflect our conviction that all the most important things we need to say must find

a way of inhabiting the single breath, the instant, if they're to shock awake our

real, breathing, present moment; because if we don't stay alive to that - we're

dead to everything.

an aphorism is a brief waste of time

Documents