A Cage Went in Search of a Bird

Aphoristic Ecstasy

I haven’t had much time to read this past week. Writing work, work work, and life have all intervened. When I hit a busy patch like this, I tend to read mostly poetry, which I like to look at when I’m in bed and falling asleep. Sometimes it’ll get into your dreams. This is why my poetry bookshelves are both in my bedroom. But, recently, I found myself seeking out and reading books that deal in aphoristic structures. A couple I’d read before; a couple I never had. I love proverbs, aphorisms, maxims, axioms, pearls of wisdom, koans, whatever. They’re a form of literature that goes back to the beginning of written culture (and oral culture as well), and maybe the purest method for expressing an idea. Here’s some of what I’ve recently surveyed.

Various Ancient Greek stuff
When I was learning to read Ancient Greek¹, aphorisms and fragmentary writings were my bread and butter. I think the earliest use of the word was when Hippocrates titled a collection of medical insights and advice Aphorisms. Some of it seems ridiculous today:

Invalids bear food worst during summer and autumn, most easily in winter, and next in spring.

Some of it is banal:

Diseases about the kidneys and bladder are cured with difficulty in old men.

And one is immortal:

Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult.

Among the Greeks, Heraclitus coined maybe my favorite Ancient aphorism:

You can never step in the same river twice.

It might feel pat now, but as a summation of the evolving nature of how we might experience not just the material world but also, it can be extrapolated, matters of the heart and soul, it’s razor-sharp—but perhaps also a little freeing.
Loeb’s The Greek Anthology Books 1-6, a compendium of Greek epigrams, was well worn by me while studying the language. It’s a cacophony of fragments and sayings—even bits of the New Testament—in Greek on the left and English on the right. There’s a lot of gold in there, but one that I see I previously highlighted and underlined is this, which is attributed to the monk/philosopher Rufinus:

I have armed my breast with wisdom against Love; nor will he conquer, if it be a single combat. I, a mortal, will stand up against an immortal. But if he has Bacchus to help him, what can I alone do against two?

I love its structure: set-up and punch line. “I’ve been burned before,” it says to me, “and I won’t love (or simply fuck) carelessly again. But, oof, if hedonism enters the picture, all bets are off.” Story of my life.

The Analects of Confucius
Also known as: Filial Piety: The Book.

Pensées by Blaise Pascal
Charles Willeford, who is probably my favorite crime novelist, used maybe my favorite Pascal aphorism for the epigraph in his book Miami Blues:

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

An ascetic Christian, Pascal wrote these fragments as apologetics in defense of his religion. But there are plenty of barely Christian, some perhaps unintentionally comedic, some pretty morbid observations in here:

Two faces are alike; neither is funny by itself, but side by side their likeness makes us laugh.

Justice is as much a matter of fashion as charm is.

The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished for ever.

Aphorisms by Franz Kafka

I didn't know until recently that there were Kafka aphorisms, but I wasn't surprised to find he was a master of the form. Also not a surprise: The most gemlike of his sayings are like condensed versions of his longer work:

From a certain point on, there is no turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

A cage went in search of a bird.

A man was astounded by the ease of the path of eternity. It was because he took it downhill, at a run.

The fact that the only world is a constructed world takes away hope and gives us certainty.

Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery.

Cumulatively, Kafka’s aphorisms tally up to an examination of boundaries, faith, morality, and perception. He might be the winner of all the books I read this past week. But then there’s…

All Gall is Divided by Emil Cioran
Perhaps my favorite aphorist. Cioran’s best book, 1973’s The Trouble with Being Born, is the essential text of the anti-natalist philosophy, which basically states that to give the “gift” of life to a child is to commit an act of violence upon them; that since a child cannot consent to being born, we are assaulting and wronging them by bringing them into this meat grinder of a world. If you ever needed justification for your instinct not to have children, this is the school of thought for you. All Gall is Divided is a collection of Cioran’s musings on a broad spectrum of things, but they are of a piece very grim, very cynical, and often very funny.

Beware of those who turn their backs on love, ambition, society. They will take revenge for having renounced…

How easy it is to be “deep”: all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

Models of style: the swearword, the telegram, the epitaph.

Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.

Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile.

The Real gives me asthma.

Leukemia is the garden where God blooms.

I have daily converse with my skeleton—something which my flesh will never forgive.

I daydream about Cioran owning the best Twitter feed ever, were he alive today.

Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer
An interesting structure to these chunks of writing: Most are very short essays, but are too long to really be called aphorisms. I found some things in here that made me feel uncomfortably seen, though:

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

The genitals are, far more than any other external member of the body, subject entirely to the will and not at all to knowledge…

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Kind of have to throw this on the list even though I didn't read it this past week and, in fact, I haven’t read it in years. But, you know: Aurelius. A favorite:

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.

I Remember by Joe Brainard
I know: This is not a book of aphorisms. It’s a memoir told in impressionistic, poetic blurbs. But some of them feel epigram-adjacent to me in that they have served to be sort of epiphanic, so I’m including it here. If you haven't read this book yet, please do so. Then write your own version.

Notes on the Cinematograph by Robert Bresson
I first read this book maybe a decade ago, before I’d seen any Bresson films. Now that I’m pretty much caught up on the cinema side of things—which I recommend you do too because nobody has ever made movies like his—I’ve come back to the book and found it even richer and more useful than I did before. Though it functions on one level as a moviemaking textbook, much of what Bresson has to say can be applied to life writ large as well. Bresson famously used non-actors as stars in his work, referring to them as “models.” If one reads this book thinking of film as life and the model as a person living life, one can glean all sorts of lessons and insights—especially as related to creativity.

Let it be the feelings that bring about the events. Not the other way.

Don't run after poetry. It penetrates unaided through the ellipses.

The insensible bond, connecting your furthest apart and most different images, is your vision.

Retouch some real with some real.

Be the first to see what you see as you see it.

Practice the precept: find without seeking.

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

Empty the pond to get the fish.

Today, brevity is practiced and valued everywhere in mainstream culture: Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram are the most pernicious and pervasive examples. These outlets are where, if we were a species that was evolving rather than devolving, the aphoristic urge would be expressed most frequently today. What better place than Twitter (which I can’t bring myself to call “X”) to distribute aphorisms? It should be a veritable marketplace of them. But it’s not. And why not? An obvious and perhaps too easy answer would be: Because the world is stupid now. But another, perhaps scarier answer might be: We’ve already said everything that needs to be said.

As Marcus Aurelius wrote: How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life.

1. A skill which I’ve, sadly, let languish.