Epigrammes

19 Wise and Not So Wise Saws

1.      There are as many intellectuals to speak to as I have fingers on one toe.

2.      Birds eat plums on the ground all day, grow fat and can’t fly; when the fruit ferments they hang upside down and sing sentimental songs.

3.      If you live long enough, you outlive your enemies; but you probably forget why they are enemies.

4.      The whole earth is burning, melting, drying out, and you worry about your weight?

5.      The heavy rains brought in an invisible creature; we could see only the blur, but no shape, no droppings; then a trap baited with cheese snapped shut, a grey-blue rat. What will the next storm wash in?

6.      That silent voice out of the wilderness, can it be heard in nightmares and are we obliged to listen? No, it says, run away before you understand. It is the same old voice of hatred and rage.

7.      Someone put his leather sandals in our recycle bin this morning and that reminds me of Jason and the Argonauts. Can there be a classical scholar somewhere on this street who is sending me a signal?

8.      A very large nest fell out of the tree. It is big, round and made of well-bound grass. Inside a very tiny chamber a very tiny speckled egg, probably a grey warbler. We have taken it into our kitchen. Perhaps its parents will come in search, or, by a kind of miracle, if we keep it warm, the egg will hatch.

9.      Weekends are the time to get sick, hence the title. Holidays and vacations bring on illness and injury, too, the intensity of which is measured by the distance to clinics, hospitals and ambulances.

10.   Many years ago I watched a squirrel caught in the wheels of a car on a leafy suburban street. It silently bled to death. The image won’t ever go out of my mind. It stands in the place of loved ones and friends who have passed away while I was on the other side of the world. All is painful silence.

11.   The modern mind is scheduled to emerge sometime in the next millennium.  It will be characterized by honesty, courage and eloquence. Until then, alas, we must carry on with the humbugs, scallywags and professional liars now in power.

12.   Out of the blue come faces I have not seen in decades, but not always the names. Time slows down memory while it hurtles towards our own oblivion. Auld lang syne is not just a song of nostalgia, but the anthem for those who approach and yet never make it across the room.

13.   A slip and a fall into the gorge, the crunch of bones against a boulder and searing pain: then heroic rescue by helicopter and long care in hospital. Even when one’s children are past fifty, they are our babies and the agony is shared.

14.   I soon will enter what is probably my last decade. Every moment counts, and yet counting speeds up the process. Better to step out of time for a moment and linger in an oblivion of sleep and thoughtlessness. Moments I have missed can be reconstructed later, if there is a small intrusion of lateness. One more nap, perhaps, one more dream.

15.   What an honour to be on the New Year List, but no mention that an old acquaintance is a Jew. To those who know, the name is a give-away, or the way he looks in the photograph. In one sense, this is great: his religion raises no barriers to recognition by the Crown. In another sense, we others cannot kvell, that is, bask in reflected glory, as we always have: such naches (communal joy in one’s fellow’s achievements) are not to be lest we stir up the demons, once again prowling and on the attack. We now hope no one out there notices.

16.   A young bird flew into our kitchen and was caught in the corner between windows. As it flitted and fluttered, banging its head against the glass, I covered it with a cloth, then coaxed it into a jug and released it into the garden. Did it tell its story to its fellow creatures, recounting its entrapment in the strange nest the big ones live in and of the air that was too stiff to fly through? Was it aware—and then passed it on—that there was help when needed from the hands that feed it bread every morning? Or was the very concept of a window too overwhelming to feel anything but panic?

17.   Sometimes it feels as though people from a few hundred years ago were trailing along beside me and prompt me explain to them all the changes in the world since they were last here. Not the big ideas and events, of course, since they never change, but all the wee details, textures and tastes of our post-modern existence. Such a conversation makes me more aware than usual of the kind of life I lead—or rather, since I have so little to do with the actual substances of the culture around me: it makes me try to explain to myself what my neighbours do and think all day. What I really want to know, however, is how those imaginary men and women from the generations before I was born, experienced the world; absent that, I have to keep reading old books.

18.   Van Gogh did not cut away his ear, only a part of the lobe. Not everything you hear about is true, usually only a little bit.

19.  In the old stories of a journey to the moon, the travellers believe and see that each orb is a moon and an earth to the other.  Like the characters Lemuel Gulliver encounters on his strange adventures, the lunar folk are distortions of ourselves, and see us in the same way through a fun house mirror. If one lives long enough, our own memories present similar versions of the world we used to inhabit in our youth.