Sayings for November

PECULIAR APHORISMS and PSEUDO-PROVERBS

In this age of deceit and dissonance, the only hope is to find someone who cares enough to dissent and desist.  Otherwise there is neither hope nor trust.

*

When the troubles began, I planted many seeds on the window sill, watered them, and watched them break out towards the sun.  The time would come, soon, for setting them out in the garden, and waiting for the vegetables to mature.  But the troubles continued.  I could not face the normal rhythms of nature.  Now the soil is dry.

*

Someone tells a story, and goes on and on.  Everyone falls asleep.  When we awake, he is still speaking. The next time we awaken, he is gone.  “What was he going on about?”  Everyone shrugs.  It is not true, then, that a well-told tale grabs our attention and takes our consciousness to new heights.  “What’s that you said?”

*

We thought, if you got to know your enemy and were patient, it would either pass or we would learn to live with it.  But they and we and it have lost all distinction and you are beyond understanding. Clouds dissolve into the sunset, colours drain away, sleep covers over the will to think.

*

Someday all these youngsters with strange names and misspelt versions of traditional names will grow old and they will sit around in the retirement village, tired and grey, gossiping and swapping reminiscences, and no one will realize how ridiculous they sound when they speak to one another by name. 

*

The rain falls perpendicular in heavy, long cables, as the French say. The sun cuts across in a horizontal swathe, blindingly, as though to intimidate us.  This is as much as anyone can take.  “As if I cared.” 

*

If Heidegger were a hedgehog, we would never understand him.  If Nietzsche found his niche in history, would we care?  Swedenborg and Kierkegaard could never be friends for all they shared of northern gloom.  Ludwig Wittgenstein almost poked Karl Popper with a poker. 

*

He is sixteen.  He watches children’s television and sees the propaganda.  He goes outside, walks to the road, sees a woman, stabs her as she stands with her daughters.  He goes home, notices blood on his shirt, wonders what that is.  Then he sits on the couch with his parents and looks at a movie.  The police arrive and everyone is surprized.  Verdict: This young man has “issues”.

*

It was against my principles to read diaries, letters, memoires, biographies and other personal writings.  Authors should be known by their art—poetry, novels, plays, essays.  I avoided studying anyone whose life overtook his or her literary achievement, whose life seemed to be mere gossip.  So mostly what was avoided were the texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Then things changed.  I grew old. Life is too precious to be skipped over and the memory of rumours and gossip is the stuff of reality.  It may be too late to catch up on all I missed, but most of all, I missed most of my own life.

*

In the early decades nineteenth century there were complaints that with steam engines, telegraph messages and a plethora of daily newspapers, the new generation would be growing up with an information overload, unable to digest everything that impinged on their insecure lives.  By the end of that century, telephones, motor cars and cinema threatened the intelligence of civilized nations. Soon there would be wireless voices and flying machines, electric iceboxes and bread-slicing machines. Is there no end to this madness?

*

There are four categories of traditional communication: (1) exclamations and designations by word of mouth; (2) poetic utterances of metaphoric and metonymic truth; (3) rhetorical patterns of emotional stimulation and soothing; (4) notes and pictures magnetized to the refrigerator door.

*

It is said that within a very few years, no high school or university students will have been born in the twentieth century.  Already there are many who cannot remember a childhood without television, and soon those who cannot imagine life without computers and mobile phones.  Popular culture has eclipsed the fine arts and classical music.  I myself gave up and withdrew from the world in 1953 after the rock’n’roll show at the Brooklyn Paramount with Alan Freed who pounded on a telephone book for the Big Beat.  From that moment on, in my budding adolescent heart, I knew civilization was doomed.  Yet for years I kept (though never played) the free 45-recording of “Greasy Spoon”. 

*

Nevertheless and notwithstanding, we have to deal with unpalatable truths.  Like the naïve traveller who wanders through the forest searching for mushrooms without knowing which are poisonous or not, if we have no authorities we can trust, how much dare we taste in experiment?  One thing for sure, however, we have learned elsewhere, that alluring appearance and pleasant smell cannot be our guide. 

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