'Martyrs of a Future World Religion'

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.”