'The Moment of the Aphorism'

A faulty memory is a blessing. Imagine having the sort of memory customarily called “photographic.” Think of recalling in perfect detail every joke loudly delivered in a crowded room that fell flat; every petty theft or faux pas; every lie, whopper or white; every untoward fantasy. Life would be self-inflicted torment, truly instant karma. Then again, recollections of the small and unimportant, especially if they are soothing or amusing, and come trailing a cloud of associated memories, can carry a blessing.

I was newly and only temporarily sober, and living in a small town in Ohio and working in a library when I read in The New York Review of Books an essay by V.S. Pritchett on a writer unknown to me, Gerald Brenan. The issue was dated Jan. 25, 1979, forty years ago today. Brenan was Pritchett’s longtime friend and both men loved Spain. The country had interested me since I first read Unamuno, years before. I had read and enjoyed Pritchett’s Marching Spain (1928) and The Spanish Temper (1954). Thanks to him I had read Fortunata and Jacinta (1886), a great novel by Benito Pérez Galdós. Pritchett remains one of my oldest and best teachers. How good it is to remember reading his review and eventually reading Brenan, including The Spanish Labyrinth (1950) and his study of St. John of the Cross (1973). Here is how Pritchett begins his review:

“There is a moment in the old age of a writer when he finds the prospect of one more long haul in prose intimidating and when he claims the right to make utterances. We grow tired of seeing our experience choked by the vegetation in our sentences. We opt for the pithy, the personal, and the unapologetic. For years we have had a crowd of random thoughts waiting on our doorstep, orphans or foundlings of the mind that we have not adopted: the moment of the aphorism, the epigram, the clinching quotation has come.”