Everybody Poops and Everybody Aphorizes: Emerson, Thoreau, and James Richardson

“Mother Nature is a serial killer. No one’s better.”  That's from the movie World War Z. The speaker is a brilliant young Harvard M.D., who might seem a more likely savior of humanity than Brad Pitt.  

Lake Michigan, a Little West of Mackinaw Bridge

From www.dictionary.reference.com and www.thefreedictionary.com . . .   

Aphorism:

A pithy observation that contains a general truth. A concise statement of a scientific principle, typically by an ancient classical author.

1. A tersely phrased statement of a truth or opinion; adage                 2. A brief statement of a principle.

Synonyms: maxim, saying, adage, precept, proverb, moral Amish Buggy, E. of Sault Ste Marie, Ont.

From http://literary-devices.com/:   “An aphorism is a concise statement that is made in a matter of fact tone to state a principle or an opinion that is generally understood to be a universal truth. Aphorisms are often adages, wise sayings and maxims aimed at imparting sense and wisdom. It is to be noted that aphorisms are usually witty and curt and often have an underlying tone of authority to them.”

Blind River, Ontario

  Banjo Reasons for resisting or hating aphorisms:

  1.     I don’t trust certainty.  Basic info is one thing: today is a Wednesday in July of 2013. Okay.    But if someone says he knows the gods, the gods are friends of his, and they want us to eat cotton candy today . . .  because “Wednesday” sounds like “wedding” and we must overeat sugar at weddings . . . when someone starts adding inferred or symbolic meanings, from the clouds or the Academy, our red-flag antennae should start to hum.  

  2.     Almost by definition, aphorisms are condescending. How much should I listen to anyone  speaking from on high to me, at me?  

  3.     Aphorisms are, or sound like, oversimplifications of complex ambiguities.

Rush Hour, I-75, South of Mackinaw Bridge, Northern Michigan

  4.     A bugaboo of our times is our demand for speed; aphorisms pretend to offer high-speed truth, bumper-sticker truth, fortune-cookie truth, although a moment’s thought reveals that most truths worth having do not come in nutshells. 

        Perhaps I'm just aphorizing about aphorisms. Like most people, I think, I sometimes find myself trying to reduce the universe and human experience to my own aphorisms, which might be like trying to write my own Bible.

However, the poet and Princeton professor, James Richardson, in his book Vectors (2001), has made me aware of how un-final, open-ended, subtle, and poetically pregnant aphorisms can be. Here are just two of the briefer examples:

#4.  Despair says I cannot lift that weight. Happiness says I do not have to. 

#6.  Our avocations bring us the purest joys. Praise my salads or my softball, and I am deified for a day. But tell me I am a great teacher or a great writer and you force me to tell myself the truth.

Does any of the above explain my caution—maybe it’s a love-hate response—toward Emerson and Thoreau? They play Daddy to my Child, even when they tell the truth. Yet they knock my brain’s socks off rather often.  

Here’s Emerson (1803 – 1882) at age 61 in a journal entry (an entry that also instructs us about the importance of commas, for his opening word, "Within," is a crucial pause):  

“Within, I do not find wrinkles and used heart, but unspent youth.”

In 1845, “. . . the best part, I repeat, of every mind is not that which he knows, but that which hovers . . . .”   

Hovering

I like the possibility of ending the sentence there, on the hummingbird note of “hovers,” but Emerson goes on, “that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing, unpossessed, before him.” That’s pretty good too.

What did we all write in our journals today?