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.”

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.]

One of my friends is reliably cheerful. We should all have friends like him. His emails and telephone calls are never annoyingly cloying, in the sense that they knock me out of whatever self-centered snit I’m nursing. Without ever saying so, he reminds me that I have it pretty good, certainly better than most of the human race. He’s not obnoxious about his gregarious nature and never tries to impose it. That’s part of his charm. His good nature is contagious and has been for more than fifty years, since I first met him. I thought of him while again reading Montaigne’s “On Some Verses of Virgil”: “My judgment keeps me indeed from kicking and grumbling against the discomforts that nature orders me to suffer, but not from feeling them. I, who have no other aim but to live and be merry, would run from one end of the world to the other to seek out one good year of pleasant and cheerful tranquillity. A somber, dull tranquillity is easy enough to find for me, but it puts me to sleep and stupefies me; I am not content with it. If there are any persons, any good company, in country or city, in France or elsewhere, residing or traveling, who like my humors and whose humors I like, they have only to whistle in their palm and I will go furnish them with essays in flesh and bone.” That describes my friend more than me. I think of it as an aspiration, a sort of moral, emotional ideal. For him, it’s a gift. I need perpetual reminding. My favorite among all of Theodore Dalrymple’s thousands of essays and columns remains “Reasons to Be Cheerful,” published in the December 13, 2003, edition of The Spectator: “I’m never bored. I’m appalled, horrified, angered, but never bored. The world appears to me so infinite in its variety that many lifetimes could not exhaust its interest. So long as you can still be surprised, you have something to be thankful for (that is one of the reasons why the false knowingness of street credibility is so destructive of true happiness).”

In comparison to the late D.G. Myers, I’m a quietist, waiting for something to happen rather than stepping on the accelerator myself. He supplied me with more ideas and inspirations than I was ever able to offer him. A longtime reader reminds me of “The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time,” a project David started and together we  organized almost sixteen years ago. That’s sufficiently remote in time to make it feel like a pottery shard dug up from a kitchen midden. David and I and eleven other writers/bloggers responded to a list of nine questions or prompts we had formulated, plus a summing up written by David. The resulting symposium is at once familiar and eerily alien. In 2009, I see I was already thinking of book blogging retrospectively, as a done deal. Here is one of the questions I formulated and my response:  “Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?”:   “There are no golden ages, only golden moments. I once worked with a newspaper editor who said something like this: ‘You pay your dollar and read the paper. If you find one story that amuses you or teaches you something new, you got your money’s worth.’ To read a blog costs nothing. Peruse the blog roll at Anecdotal Evidence. If you can’t find something there that moves or enlightens you, or drives you pleasingly irate, go check your pulse.”   Glib but true. Here is the late Terry Teachout’s reply to the same question:   “Er, who are all those ‘famous’ book bloggers? Blogging is no longer a novelty, but artblogging of all sorts, including literate commentary on literature, has always been a minority pursuit and always will be.”   Go to David’s blog, A Commonplace Blog, and scroll down to the bottom of the left column to read the entire symposium.