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Bookclub: "The Oxford Book of Aphorisms"
Presented by Michael Dirda
Washington Post Book World Senior Editor
Thursday, April 25, 2002; Noon EDT
Welcome to the online meeting of The Washington Post Book Club, a monthly program presented by the editors and writers of Washington Post Book World. Post Book World Senior Editor Michael Dirda will be leading the discussion on this month's selection, John Gross's "The Oxford Book of Aphorisms."
Submit your questions ahead of time or during the discussion.
These days, Dirda says he still spends inordinate amounts of time mourning his lost youth, listening to music (Glenn Gould, Ella Fitzgerald, Diana Krall, The Tallis Scholars), and daydreaming ("my only real hobby"). He claims that the happiest hours of his week are spent sitting in front of a computer, working. In the fall of 2000 Indiana University Press published "Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments," a selection from Dirda's Book World columns. He hopes to bring out a companion volume soon.
Dirda joined The Post in 1978, having grown up in the working-class steel town of Lorain, Ohio and graduated with highest honors in English from Oberlin College. His favorite writers are Stendhal, Chekhov, Jane Austen, Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot, Nabokov, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Mitchell and Jack Vance. He thinks the greatest novel of all time is either Murasaki Shikubu's "The Tale of Genji" or Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu." In a just world he would own Watteau's painting "The Embarkation for Cythera." He'd also like to spend six months in Florida writing a book that would become a runaway best seller, a critical success, and the hottest cinematic property of the year. A guy can daydream, right?
Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
Michael Dirda: Welcome to The Washington Post Book World's Book Club--am I alone in finding that hard to say and write? At any event, for the next hour we'll discuss this month's club selection, The Oxford Book of Aphorisms, compiled by John Gross.
Before we begin, let me say that I do hope people enjoyed this book. You can browse and rebrowse in it for the rest of your life. Because all the entries are basically only a sentence or two, you can read one and think about it for the rest of the day, or you can just gobble them up, one after another, seeking those that speak to you. I do hope posters will want to exchange some of their favorite aphorisms with the online audience, perhaps commenting on why such and such a maxim is so appealing. In my little write-up I mentioned some of my favorites and will, for convenience, repeat a couple of them now:
"One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures wihtout making a mistake" (Chekhov); "All passions exaggerate; it is because they exaggerate that they are passions." (Chamfort). "I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity, which religion is powerless to bestow."
Anyway, there's a start. Let's take a look at what others think, and I"ll comment as I go along.
By the way, let me announce that if you enjoy this discussion you might want to stop back at 2 for my regular Thursday online discussion of books.
Michael Dirda: Welcome to The Washington Post Book World's Book Club--am I alone in finding that hard to say and write? At any event, for the next hour we'll discuss this month's club selection, The Oxford Book of Aphorisms, compiled by John Gross.
Before we begin, let me say that I do hope people enjoyed this book. You can browse and rebrowse in it for the rest of your life. Because all the entries are basically only a sentence or two, you can read one and think about it for the rest of the day, or you can just gobble them up, one after another, seeking those that speak to you. I do hope posters will want to exchange some of their favorite aphorisms with the online audience, perhaps commenting on why such and such a maxim is so appealing. In my little write-up I mentioned some of my favorites and will, for convenience, repeat a couple of them now:
"One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures wihtout making a mistake" (Chekhov); "All passions exaggerate; it is because they exaggerate that they are passions." (Chamfort). "I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity, which religion is powerless to bestow."
Anyway, there's a start. Let's take a look at what others think, and I"ll comment as I go along.
By the way, let me announce that if you enjoy this discussion you might want to stop back at 2 for my regular Thursday online discussion of books.
Crofton, Md.:
I loved this selection! I fianlly got a copy
from Amazon. I like the way Mr. Gross organizes the book into intelligeible chapters.
I looked in vain for my favortie quote:
Oscar Wilde: A cynic is a man who knows the
value of nothing and the price of everything.
Michael Dirda: Glad to hear you liked the book. I hope it wasn't too hard to find, as there is a paperback edition as well as a cloth.
Wilde is given as the source of almost every other wittyh remark ever made, and so it's possible he isn't the originator of the cynic quote. My favorite quote like this is from, I think, Lily Tomlin: "No matter how cynical you are, you're never cynical enough."
My favorite Wilde quote goes something like"Only an auctionneer appreciates every kind of art."
Gross is himself an interesting man--the former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, now a drama reviewer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters and of several other books, including a memoir of growing up Jewish in ENgland.
Harrisburg, Pa.:
Karl Marx: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, up until now; the point, however, is to change it."
Marx's aphorism -- or his "thesis on Feuerbach" -- certainly continues to be a guiding light in my life, though these days there are few philosophers or world-changers either interpreting or altering the world.
Michael Dirda: Ah, but can one change the world? I sometimes wonder. Perhaps the most profound, if seemingly paradoxical, of proverbs is the French: Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. My own favorite Marx quote comes from the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, where he says that everything in history appears twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Crofton, Md.:
Michael you're a great fan of La Rochefoucald. His pithy sayings are ajoy to behold. Are his writings available in most bookstores?
Michael Dirda: Yes, in several translations, including a recent one published only this month. The Penguin--by Leonard Tancock?--is good, as is the old version by Louis Kronenberger, a semi-forgotten man of letters (the fate of most men of letters) who particularly loved worldly literature. The best La Rochefoucauld quote that he never said is including in Gross: "In love there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek."
Jampur, Pakistan:
Dear sir: Only thanks for this good program.
Michael Dirda: thank you for tuning in.
Lenexa, Kans.:
Mr. Dirda, --Nice Addition to My Library--
Gross says in intro that aphorisms have moved from science more to the moral and philosophical. Surely one of the reasons is the Galens don't age nearly as well as the Aureliuses (given the paradigm and Grand Narrative shifts). Some life scientists think, e.g., all who wrote before 1859 should be politely ignored.
I did find a lot of timeless cleverness. I had forgotten how slick Bierce was. Also esp. resonant were Diderot, Mill, Nietzsche, Santayana, Russell, Camus. (My favorite Camus wasn't included: "If prayer really worked, we'd all be praying unceasingly.")
Baudelaire: "Prizes bring bad luck. Academic prizes, prizes for virtue, decoration..." Can we assume you've learned your lesson with the Pulitzer and will be turning down MacArthurs and a circa 2030 trip to Stockholm? Thanks.
Michael Dirda: Do you remember senior superlatives from high school graduation? MOst intelligent, handsomest, most athletic, etc. ? I came in second in most of the the categories, so a friend dubbed me: Most likely to just miss succeeding.
I don't think much of prizes, as the wrong people tend to get them, and no doubt many would include me in that company. Still, it's nice to have a Pulitzer, and would have pleased my unpleasable father, had he been alive to see the day. But we must make a distinction between prizes and money: One can honorably pursue money, and so I still live on the hope that one day the MacArthur Foundation will come to its senses and call me up.
Crofton, Md.:
I notice that Mr.Gross quotes mainly philosophers. But I think Groucho Marx' nasty
delicious aphorisms are just delightful. What
say you?
Michael Dirda: They are delightful. Can you quote us a couple?
Lenexa, Kans.:
Wilde may have said "Only an auctioneer can be enthusiastic..."
"Failure is not the only punishment for laziness: There is also the success of others."--Renard
The creative mind tends to have a jealous side--which hardly seems admirable. However, Renard's aphorism does seem undeniable. Who was it said something like "Not only must I succeed but that all the others fail"? Thanks.
Michael Dirda: I'm pretty sure it was Gore Vidal. I've also heard a somewhat pithier version, which I used to keep tacked on my bulletin board in graduate school, that piranha-pool of competition: "Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little."
Washington, D.C.:
What is an "aphorism?"
Michael Dirda: Well, I think o fit as a concise and witty observation about the nature of life. Sometimes there's a bit of malice or cynicism to it as well. "We must laugh before we are happy, for fear of dying without having laughed at all." (La Bruyere). "Those who are slow to understand think that slowness is the essence of knowledge." Nietzsche. "The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs." Chesterton.
Reston, Va.:
Was it Emerson who said something like, "Don't give me quotations. Tell me what you know?" Which I think is a pretty good quote and doesn't keep me from enjoying aphorisms.
Michael Dirda: Emerson was a brilliant phrase maker, in particular in his journals. There's a little paperback called something like The Essential Emerson, compiled by Daniel Aaron and Justin Kaplan (I think), which gathers short passages from the transcendentalist: The more he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons. . . . In skating over thin ice our saftey lies in our speed. He's really good.
Orlando, Fla.:
I have often been drawn towards reading the novels of Margaret Atwood, a Canadian writer. However, I often hear her works referred to as being overly feminist in tone and content. On the other hand I have heard so many postive ravings about her work from both sexes, and know she has recently won the Booker prize for the novel "The Blind Assassin". I have also heard that her one mystery novel "Alias Grace" was also nominated for that award a few years ago.
What is your opinion of her writing and where would you recommend I start to get to know her works?
Michael Dirda: This question really belongs in the 2 PM chat, but since you're here. . . Most people seem to feel that Atwood's best book is The Handmaid's Tale. But the two books you mention are also very good. I have some reservations about The Blind Assassin, but it's certainly readable and appealing and has its own mystery. By the way, ATwood can be very witty: She came to study at the Universtiy of Toronto, she said, because she wanted to meet Northrop Frye and touch the hem of his garment.
Crofton, Md.:
I won't see the play HAIR. All I have to do
look at myself in the mirror in the morning.
I will not join a club that has me as a member.
Here's one from the late Sam Goldwyn: Anyone
who sees a psychiatrist ought to have his
head examined.
When asked if he knew Einstein's theory of
relativity, Goldwin is said to have replied:
Relatives? I never hire'em.
Michael Dirda: Cute. I remember Groucho writing to, I think, T.S. Eliot (the two admired each other) and confessing to an admiration for Jack the Ripper, adding that he always wanted to follow in his footsteps. This sounds macabre and obviously misogynistic, but I can remember thinking it very clever when I was 12 or 13.
Lenexa, Kans.:
Your own writing is aphoristic. Looking thru my notebooks, I find a lot of Dirda entries. Some are you quoting others:
"T.S. Eliot says old men should be explorers."
"Our passionate hearts, said Yeats, are fastened to a dying animal."
"As Beckett says, fail, fail again, fail better."
"Burgess once said the true function of poetry is to memorize it so it can be recited aloud when drunk." Accordingly, "Dedalus" Dirda, after a few in Florida, "With rue my heart is laden..."
A Dirda aphorism: "Yet surely there is no better way to study literature than to read a lot of it."
Other non-aphorisms but favorite Dirda phrases (from notebooks):
"The sudden ache of a Proustian flashback..."
"After I read (The Hounds of...), I was no longer a kid."
"As silent as a painted car upon a painted Beltway."
Michael Dirda: Wow. I do like to quote my betters, as it tends to enrich my own prose. As I don't possess a flair for metaphor, nor a dexterous syntax, I rely on diction, tone and allusion to give life to my sentences. I do like my sentence about studying lit by reading a lot of it. It comes across with the force of an incontrovertible truth, which is what an aphorism or maxim should do.
Woodbridge, Va.:
Here is one that speaks to me: "To buy books would be a good thing if we could also buy the time to read them; as it is, the mere act of purchasing them is often mistaken for the assimilation and mastering of their contents". That's what I do!
Reminds me of the concept of "spiritual materialism"--mistaking the exterior trappings of a religion for the interior changes it promises. Or the person who deludes himself that buying fancy sports equipment will make him skilled at that sport.
Michael Dirda: Nobody ever has enough time for his pleasures. Hmm. That sounds like an aphorism.
I suppose that, with regards to spiritual materialism, we all--being human, all too human--hope for an easy way to our heart's desire. My father used to say that something could be learned in 10 easy lessons or 5 hard ones.
Crofton, Md.:
I like the following from an unlikely source
Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner in his book On the
Street where you live.the american tax system
is deigned to make the rich richer , the poor poorer and the rest of us in a permanent state of confusion.
Michael Dirda: Thanks. I think everyone falls into the last category, the rich and the poor.
Derwood, Md.:
Here's my favorite French aphorism: La couer a sa raison, la raison c'est ne connais pas - the heart has its reasons the reason knows nothing about. It explains much of my life. I also like La Rochefoucould's, grace is to the body what clear thinking is to the mind.
Michael Dirda: It's actually a little different: Le coeur a des raisons, que la raison ne connait pas. The heart has its reasons, that reason doesn't know. Pascal. His Pensees are a great fund of pithy thinking, much of it about the nature of belief, religion and such serious matters. He's the guy who wrote "The silence of these eternal spaces terrifies me." And "Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature. But he is a thinking reed." And of the grim one, which I can't quite get right, but that goes something like No matter how amusing the drama, the last act is bloody.
More Groucho:
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
There used to be a poster in the sixties: Je suis un Marxist, a la Groucho.
Michael Dirda: Nice to have these added. Clearly, anyone with a taste for aphorisms needs to keep a commonplace book, into which he or she can copy favorites. I suppose a Marxist, a la Groucho, would be closer to an anarchist than to a communist.
Woodbridge, Va.:
Not exactly aphorisms--but one thing I enjoyed in the two issues of Times Literary Supplement that I picked up following your review was the contest they have in every issue. They list three fairly short quotations or passages of verse or prose and you identify the author. I couldn't identify any of them, but the selections were grouped by theme and wonderful quotations--would probably appeal to people who like aphorisms.
Michael Dirda: Yes. That quiz is both charming to read--and dishearteningly difficult to solve. I count myself a pretty well read guy, but I've only managed to get all three answers right once in my life. I should add that I never actually make any effort to track down those quotes. STill, I thought I could remember more than I apparently can. Humility is good for the soul. Now, who said that?
College Park, Md.:
Not sure if it is in the book, nor if it is an aphorism, but I like Elizabeth Bishop's line from her poem One Art:
It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Michael Dirda: That poem is one of the great villanelles of our time. I also like her line: "We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship/ alhough it meant the end of travel." That second line doesn't sound quite right.Ah, memory, memory.
Woodbridge, Va.:
I liked the way Gross organized the aphorisms--by similar topic, but sometimes placing seemingly contradictory aphorisms right after each other.
Michael Dirda: Like verses in the Bible, aphorisms can be found to justify almost any course of action or thought. It is useful to break down the mass of material into these short, sometimes slightly arbitrary, chapters. But this is really a wonderful book, and sometimes utterly forgotten figures utter immortal remarks: " We often make people pay dearly for what we think we give them." Who was the Comtesse Diane?
College Park, Md.:
From This Side of Paradise:
Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: "Very few things matter and nothing matters very much."
On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.
Michael Dirda: Interesting passage. Not quite sure what Fitzgerald means by " a sense of security." The epigram is a classic one, and I suppose people do use to to give themselves solace during difficult times. It reminds me of the one about tyring to imagine some difficult moment being looked back upon in, say, 10 years time. What seems to be important and what's really important are seldom the same. Could that be another aphorism? Or close to one?
Rockville, Md.:
OPEN NOTICE TO MACARTHUR FOUNDATION:
Please call Michael Dirda at the Washinton Post.
Thank you.
E Barry
Michael Dirda: Ah, finally these chats have paid off. I think it's time to bring this book club discussion to a close, as I have an important phone call to take. I expect that I'll next be discussing books with you from Cassis, where I will have settled to write my magnum opus, in a study overlooking the Mediterranean. But wherever I am, you might check back on THursday at 2 for Dirda on Books. Hey, today is THursday, which means I'll be back here in an hour. Till then, keep reading!
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