From Aphorisms Arise Truth, So From Truth Arise Aphorisms

By JAY PARINI

As Umberto Eco says in a lively essay on Oscar Wilde, published in On Literature (2004), "There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism." The word itself, he tells us, comes from the Greek, meaning "putting something aside as an offering." It is also an "oblation." To most people, it calls to mind a short and possibly witty saying that may have something wise to suggest about the nature of life. As with Wilde, such maxims have a paradoxical or (at least) unexpected quality, as when Wilde (in The Picture of Dorian Gray) writes: "An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style."

Eco does not believe that an aphorism needs to be witty, but for its real lovers, that paradoxical twist is difficult to relinquish. We like it when an apparently wise saying goes against the grain, reversing the usual expectations, as when Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, a French aphorist of the 18th century, wrote: "A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is over."

Chamfort's line can be found in Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, recently published by Bloomsbury USA. James Geary, writer and editor, has been at the aphoristic fount before, in The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism (Bloomsbury, 2005). Rich in surprises, that marvelous book opened the possibilities for the more comprehensive Guide. Many of the aphorists in the new book will be known to everyone: Plato and Cicero, Michel de Montaigne, Dr. Johnson, Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Wilde, and so forth. But the real pleasures lie in the volume's unexpected treasures: Chamfort, Ludwig Marcuse, Karol Bunsch, Faina Ranevskaya, Ali Ibn Abi Talib, Benjamin Whichcote, and countless others.

Quoting Franklin Roosevelt, Geary begins by saying that his motto in compiling the anthology was: "Be sincere, be brief, be seated." As a result, he does not linger on any one aphorist and offers a brief but entertaining biography of each, with a selection of essential aphorisms followed by a fascinating section called "Parallel Lines." Aphorists like all creative writers to some extent, are gifted plagiarists; that is, they feed on language, taking and transforming what went before them, giving fresh life to what was taken. Ideas belong to no one, only specific language does. And so aphorists take a whiff of what's in the air and put a name to what they smell. Thus we read in Ecclesiastes: "A fool's voice is known by a multitude of words." Centuries later, Ezra Pound says: "The less we know, the longer our explanations."

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