New Apthegms No 1

• Having gathered all the weeds together in one pile and set them beside the leaves raked up all autumn, it is time do something spectacular.  Mulch or burn.  Neither: let the wind blow them away again.

• The children gather around the sweets table at the art opening.  They are bored.  I watch them shovel the jelly beans in, and tell them: You should sample all the colors to stay healthy.  They think for a moment and then dive back in.  What would you say?

• For Heraclitus, the soul of man is a far country which cannot be approached or explored; for me, it is a little light in the middle of a dark room I am not allowed to enter.

• Even for Nietzsche, one’s self is a deep well hidden from oneself, the treasure that cannot be mined until the end of one’s days. For me, it is a large stain in the midst of one’s life that keeps spreading.  Or perhaps an amorphous cell that silently grows around the edges of one’s consciousness.

• Someone found my book The Humming Tree, of all places, in Bruges, and wrote to say it changed the way he sees the world.  If I had been in that ancient city, that other Venice of the north, I too would be changed in all my essential ways of perceiving and thinking about the world.  It is enough now, however, to have such a letter and to allow me to dream a little more.

• If the Holocaust never happened, where are the six million Jews?  Do they all live in Miami Beach in luxury retirement villas, on the shore of Tel-Aviv rubbing their hands with glee, hide in deep tunnels in the middle of the Negev Desert waiting for the Messiah, or did they never live at all, and thus all Jews are liars, cheats and ghosts?

• For more than two thousand years thought and feelings were enmeshed in the study of rhetoric, a discipline, a syllabus, a way of seeing the world and a value system.  How to disentangle oneself and write about the reality we experience, without throwing the whole vast treasury of the past out with the bathwater?

• The moon is attached to the earth by an eclipse.

• In our modern world, death has a new dimension.  After the brain is dead, one may keep the body breathing until it is convenient for family and friends to say farewell.  But how do you goodbye to someone who is no longer at home?

• There are not always two sides to every story, even if one of them might be true, but each time a story has two sides, one is like a moebius strip, the other runs wild like a filigree.