Random Aphorisms, Apothegms, and
Proverbs
I am here to keep the Christ out of Christmas,
put the fun in Fundamentalism, and enjoy the sin in Synagogue.
Ecopalians have had the piss scared out of
them.
A British publishing house should be
established with offices on the Scilly Isles and in Gigglewick. I would gladly work for it.
To improve the contents of your mind you need seychel, so go to the Seychelle Islands.
They’re all mishuggah
in Michigan.
Mind the company you keep when your business
goes into liquidation.
Never believe your enemy when he says he wants
to kill you: he doesn’t mean it—it’s just rhetoric.
Always believe the worst about your friends
because you can’t trust them. Why?
because you know them too well. Besides,
my enemy’s enemy must be my enemy too.
They used to say that to be a Jew you had to
know that the whole world was wrong in what it said about Judaism, even if it
made you squirm to believe yourself paranoid.
But now we know the rest of the world is paranoid. You have to squirm even more.
I thought you were dead years ago. Now you emerge, it seems, from under some
rock, where you absorbed the primeval sludge, and write such an anti-Semitic
screed. Better you had stayed hidden.
No matter how far you run, you always take
yourself along. Sometimes, like a shadow
at noon, it disappears in the bright sunlight, and at night, in the darkness,
it hides in waiting for a single lamp or candle to jump out at us. At such times, it is hard to know who you
are.
Ordinary people make pious general statements
about human nature and the evolution of moral customs, whereas they are at best
describing a small group of their friends in the last several decades, or
perhaps their own families when they were children. They know little of how others lived two or
three hundred years ago, let alone hundreds of thousands, and certainly not
about the origins of human consciousness, language or society. It would be foolish to try to correct them.
d sentences, as though they were reading
scripts, and scripts translated from misunderstood foreign languages? One says
that it is because it is to give an effect of the old-fashioned. Another because people actually spoke that
way. A third because to our ears, unused
already to formal speech and discourses adjusted to diverse levels of occasion,
find ourselves estranged from the recent past of our grandparents and
great-grandparents, as though they lived in another universe of ideas and
feelings.
I do not remember young children squealing and
screeching so much in the past. Nor
every baby you saw in the street had a dummy stiffed in its mouth sucking away
like a mad creature. No wonder so many adolescents drink themselves into
silliness at such an early age.
Once not too long ago, a bookshop held an Alice
in Wonderland tea party in the afternoon.
M any young children were there with their parents; no one fussed or
bothered. A group of young adults,
dressed in appropriate costumes, walked among them, passing out platters of
sliced cake and cups of tea. For a few
hours, in a small space, the world seemed surprisingly civilized. By the next day, to be sure, everything
reverted to chaos and madness.
“Why do you write books?” she said, as she
agonized over the page layouts. “Isn’t
the process too much at your age?” I
answered as best I could, unwilling to say I would be dead if writing were
impossible. “You never get reviews. The sales are meagre. Only a few dozen
friends send email to comment on what you do.”
“Yes, that’s it,” I said. “I
write for them.” “Well, then,” she said,
“next time, let me know before, so I can set everything up for you.”
Sparrows flutter in the branches waiting for me
to throw them bread. I crumble several
slices and toss it out on the grass.
They flutter down. One or two
start to chew away small bits. One or
two fly off with their morsels. A cluster hop from crumb to crumb, not sure
where to turn and peck. Three black
birds dance around, back off, dart in to take their share. Three white eyes sneak in undeterred. When everything is almost gone, the tui
swoops down, takes his portion and returns to the tree. After they have disappeared, I put off the
litter from the kitchen floor and watch a few brave souls come in for a late
breakfast.
Everyone, it is said, believes he has made the
most important discovery which for some reason or other everyone else missed
out on, and worse that no one dares to recognize. Even those whose work leads them to fame and
fortune are supposed to wonder if they are not shams and why everyone else is
foolish enough to take their explanations seriously. It would be better, the pundits aver, to wait
a few hundreds of years to see what posterity will make of us all. The trouble is, not that we will never know,
but that we actually do: since why should the future treat us differently than
we do the failed great thinkers and the would-artists of today?
On the dumbing down of society: I don’t know
what it means? There is too much clatter and squeaking to understand what they
are saying.
The destruction of Palmyra: evil, pure and
simple.
There are four calamities and five miracles in
life. The four calamities: (1) the
realization we cannot have everything we want; (2) the shock of seeing that we
cannot become all we want to be; (3) the disappointment when those closest and
dearest do not understand your hopes and ambitions or your disappointments and
frustrations; and (4) the acceptance of your fate. The five miracles: (1) the joy of being
alive, (2) the understanding that the sun will probably arise and you will be awake
and conscious the next day; (3) the acceptance that most pains, humiliations
and unfulfilled dreams will fade away in the course of time; and (4) the
pleasure in knowing that everything you suffer eventually comes to an end; and
(5) the knowledge that no matter what anyone else says, they too will be
forgotten.
.
When they push you in the ovens, said my
grandmother, they don’t give you a quiz on the laws of kashrut: for I had asked
what we believe as Jews. Now when they
run you down in the streets of Jerusalem, they don’t ask your views of
Maimonides’s commentaries on Holy Writ, nor do they inquire whether you attend
synagogue regularly or at all. But when you attempt to speak at a
politically-correct university, they investigate your views on the Palestinian
Question, and then exclude you anyway because you hesitated to agree to your
own murder.
Flowers and wreaths were placed for memorials
of those who were once loved and honoured, but now balloons, pinwheels and
little fluffy dolls, as though our grief and sadness has been dumbed down. Mourning has become infantile.
Morose, stodgy and implacable in his ideas,
Schopenhauer cuts a sad figure, hardly worthy of our respect. The more I read
about him the less I find to pity.
Cobalt and indigo make wonderful shades of
blue. But nothing is evident at the
beginning in the ore or the plant, and only long and complicated processes
prepare the colour for use in the making of cloth, porcelain or anything
else. How did our ancestors discover
what to do? Did the ritual use and
mythical meaning of such blues arise in the alchemy of their preparation, or
were they first dreamt as premonitions of beauty and spirit?
When the eyes in a Classical or Renaissance painting
stare out at us from a museum wall, obliterating centuries and great distances,
do they envy our nonchalance and misunderstanding?
In the Dominican Republic, there is a village
where virtually everyone is born a girl, and only later in adolescence do the
signs of manhood appear in some. It
happens without choice but by now not unexpectedly. For some of the adults later their female
names continue, as well as sensitivity and softness, but not homosexual
desires. For some perhaps there is a
nostalgia for the original condition.
I keep noticing how birds behave in the yard
when I throw them crumbs of bread. Some sparrows
bounce about unable to find what they know must be there by past
experience. Sometimes they stand on the
bread unaware of what is going on. They
wait until some other member of the flock begins to peck and only then recognize
the object as food. They push aside
their fellow and start to eat. Others
have learned to fly away with as large a piece as they can handle, hide under a
bush, and eat alone. Smaller birds, like
white eyes, come later and search for fragments
in the grass. Last of all, the big black
birds hop up the kitchen door to remind me I should service them as well. Do they wonder what happens in the big nest I
live in?
A line of elephants crosses the plain. They pass a jumble of bones. The larger, older elephants surround the
skeletons, gently run their trunks on the bleached bones, and seem to dream in
a sad way. The naturalist tells us they
recognize their ancestors, as though they had memories revived by the sight and
feel of these ancient remnants. Memory
of the past is one thing, to be sure: the momento mori as a sign of
death. But do these elephants see in
their own selves and fellows something under the surface of their skin?
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