A longtime reader and fellow blogger shares with me a taste for aphoristic writing, prose that is concise, of course, but also dense with meaning and often packing a sting. Aphorisms can be marketed as such but often they appear as a functional part of a larger text. George Eliot is especially good at this, as is Joseph Conrad. Read Daniel Deronda or Nostromo with pithy declarations in mind and you can fill a modest-sized commonplace book. If you don’t like “aphorism,” think maxim, apothegm, proverb, adage, bromide or aperçu.  Careful readers, as we get older, lose tolerance for clumsy, excess verbiage. Time is short. A well-crafted aphorism, a mere handful of words, contains more thought-matter than most novels. I choose “matter” purposely. A good aphorism seems to confirm Einstein’s notion that matter is energy. I think of aphorisms lying on the page, coiled to strike when released by the reader. They are not reasoned arguments.   Some people are offended by the casual stridency and truth-telling associated with aphoristic writing. Aphorisms are often a reproach to self-delusion and reveal a truth without compromise or qualification. An aphorism is the writerly opposite of popular political discourse, which aims to be “inclusive” and say nothing that might displease its intended audience. An aphorism respects the truth, not the reader. In his foreword to The Viking Book of Aphorisms (1962), W.H. Auden (a gifted aphorist himself) says an aphorism must “convince every reader that it is either universally true or true of every member of the class to which it refers, irrespective of the reader’s convictions.” My friend the late D.G. Myers loved the only aphorism I ever intentionally composed: “Politics has destroyed more writers than vodka.”   Elias Canetti (1905-94) is a deft coiner of aphorisms, even in his almost five-hundred-page masterwork, Crowds and Power (1960; trans. Carol Stewart, 1962). Last year, Fitscarraldo Editions published Canetti’s The Book Against Death (trans. Peter Filkins), a collection of short prose pieces, including aphorisms, addressing mortality. It’s a writer’s notebook, not an organized thesis. Canetti tends to favor the cryptic over the strictly moralistic. A few samples:   “The Earth as the Titanic. The last musician.”   “All of the dying are martyrs of a future world religion.”   “Death and love are always set side by side, but they only share one thing: parting.”   “What is more awful than to just go with one’s times? What is deadlier?”   In an earlier book, The Human Province (1972; trans. Joachim Neugroschel, 1978), Canetti makes an observation that will prompt admirers of aphoristic writing to nod their heads: “The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.”

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Robert Conquest writing thirty-one years ago:  “Literature is the expression of our whole past, of our whole context in life and time – and not only ours. Anatole France said that the word pleurer (to cry, to weep) in French is different from the same sort of word in every other language, if only because of its use by Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse or other of the great French amoureuses. Every word carries the history of literature, the feel of the whole country. It follows then with us language is losing its edge for lack of proper education and because of constrictive doctrine. The art world is being penetrated by narrow dogmatism in the same way.”   Take Delmore Schwartz’s sonnet “The Beautiful American Word, Sure.” In the American context, the monosyllable connotes can-do optimism, endorsement, respect, a ready willingness to help. You say, “May I hold the door for you?” and I say, “Sure.” Call it shared etiquette or civic agreeability. It implies a degree of certainty in an uncertain world. “Can you loan me five bucks?” “Sure.” Words are more than sounds or signifiers. Each packs a history, “the feel of the whole country.”   Conquest was participating in a forum, “The Humanities, in Memoriam,” held in April 1994 at Stanford University, with the remarks published in Academic Questions. Other participants included Richard Wilbur, Czesław Miłosz and René Girard. True education was already dissolving. Our ability to communicate with others was eroding. The past had never seemed so remote. For some, it never existed. Dante and Henry James had become extinct species.   Conquest is the great chronicler of Soviet crimes. As a historian, he gave us accounts of a regime that lived by a “narrow dogmatism” that sought to erase the past in the name of creating a “worker’s paradise." In Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000), Conquest writes:   “All in all, unprecedented terror must seem necessary to ideologically motivated attempts to transform society massively and speedily, against its natural possibilities. The accompanying falsifications took place, and on a barely credible scale, in every sphere. Real facts, real statistics, disappeared into the realm of fantasy. History, including the history of the Communist Party, or rather especially the history of the Communist Party, was rewritten. Unpersons disappeared from the official record. A new past, as well as new present, was imposed on the captive minds of the Soviet population, as was, of course, admitted when truth emerged in the late 1980s.”   Conquest writes of our age in lines from his great polemical poem “Whenever”:   “An age of people who are concerned, or care, With schemes that lead to slaughter everywhere.   “An age of warheads and the KGB, An age of pinheads at the Ph.D.   “When churches pander to advanced regimes Whose victims fill our nightmares with their screams,   Age that ignored the unavenged Ukraine ‘Imperialist Britain’ seething in its brain,   An age of art devised for instant shock an age of aestheticians talking cock.”   Conquest was born on this date, July 15, in 1917 (soon after the July Days when the Bolsheviks were agitating in Petrograd, and three months before the October Revolution) and died in 2015 at age ninety-eight (twenty-four years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union).   [“Whenever” can be found in Conquest’s Collected Poems (ed. Elizabeth Conquest, Waywiser Press, 2020.]

Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Parachutes My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” by Barbara Guest appeared first on The American Scholar.

How we went from an architecture of collapse to a simulation for survival