Aphorisms XVI

“It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.”

Evelyn Waugh

(Thanks to Futility Closet)

Aphorisms XV!

"Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking."

Robert Anton Wilson

Aphorisms XV

"Disobedience was man's Original Virtue"

Oscar Wilde

Aphorisms

The Futility Closet is a wonderful source of aphorisms of which my regular readers know I am particularly fond. Two more below ...

“Sleep is death enjoyed.” — Friedrich Hebbel
“Character is that which can do without success.” — Emerson

... which got me thinking "What exacly is an aphorism". Yes, I know how ro recognise one but I don't know how to define one. So off to Wikipedia and it tells me.

"An aphorism is an original thought, spoken or written in a laconic (concise) and memorable form.^[1] Aphorism literally means a "distinction" or "definition", from Greek ἀφορισμός (aphorismós), which is from ἀπό (apo) and ὁρίζειν (horizein), meaning "from/to bound". The term was first used in the Aphorisms of Hippocrates. The oft-cited first sentence of this work (see Ars longa, vita brevis) is:

"Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience deceptive, judgment difficult."

Free Study

Thanks to Futility Closet ...

“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.” — Samuel Johnson

“Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.” — Plato

“Oh! it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.” — Oscar Wilde

Aphorisms XIV

"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

George Bernard Shaw

Aphorisms XIII

"I've never done good things, I've never done bad things, I never did anything out of the blue".

David Bowie

Aphorisms XII

“Thinking is the hardest work there is. That’s why so few people engage in it.”

Henry Ford

Aphorisms XI

A long time since I posted an aphorism - I'm not changing the header but here's a good one from an 1897 letter by perhaps the Master of Aphorisms, Oscar Wilde.

“I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue. It is unnatural virtue that makes the world, for those who suffer, such a premature hell.”

The Darkness

No posts for a long time. A new aphorism - Isak Dinesen.

One might think everything should be sweet and rosy since the family's return at the end of July but it has not been so easy ...

Jaime and Kezia are well-esconced in the best schools on the island. Kezia had her first physical and blood test two weeks ago - everything fine. However, she is suffering fro what appear to be insect bites (but from which the rest of us are not suffering) and we are keeping them at bay (i.e. not infected) with antiseptic cream. However, doctor appointment tomorrow or Saturday.

The Darkness - my unemployment, debts, stretcing a long way to make ends meet, enormous electricity outages, very slow or no Internet, not keeping up with the web, Internet leukaemia friends, reverse culture and relationship shock and difficulties etc etc.

Aphorisms IX - Who watches the Watchmen?

As I haven't changed my heading aphorism in a long time and in the light of recent revelations ...

- Member of Parliament expenses

- the National Health Service IT programme to keep all our healthcare records in one massive database

- government plans to introduce a national ID database

- various losses of confidential data on computers, USB sticks and even paper, both civil and military

- Joao de Menezes murder by the UK police

etc etc

it is time to change my head aphorism to ...

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.

" Who watches the Watchmen?"

from Juvenal's Satires, VI, 347 - epigraph to the 1987 US Tower Commission Report into the Iran-Contra affair.

Aphorisms VIII

"Day & Night, Black & White, Wrong & Right, Spin & Spin, Stupid Heart Cupid Heart".

Before all of this (a child with leukaemia), I was not overly concerned and perhaps am still not

When Kezia was still real small she and Jaime (and me) would dance to Don Van Vliet/Captain Beeefheart's Bat Chain Puller. A song and an album - it talks so much of our new aphorism above, which, to confess, I don't understand. An amalgam of rhymes from the aforesaid album.

Kezia would dance and dance and dance to it ...

Aphorisms VII

“What the public really loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it.”

Joe Orton.

Sounds a bit like cancer!

Aphorisms VI

It has been a long time since I changed the aphorism that appears under the title of this blog but on Monday Dr Rant pointed me to a paper (of which more in the next post) which quotes Aristotle and the definition of the term "Phronesis".

This pretty much describes the English expression "Jack of all trades, master of none" and my current employment. I have advised on and inspected antenna paint systems, I have quantified and provided analysis of diesel and transformer oil analysis reports, I have trained people in 950 KW generator maintenance, I have scuba-dived with no training (I got down 4 metres and my ears were bursting - I surfaced and the contractor, knowing it was my first time, told me "Oh we forgot to tell you how to alleviate the pressure difference"! - I've since undertaken a PADI course!), I have shown transmitter technicians how to update EPROM chip software, I have advised on road construction, administered a LAN etc etc. I am not qualified to do any of this ... but, unlike many people, I will admit my ignorance and will ask questions or research. I am grateful to my school and university education for teaching me to do this.

But this aphorism also applies to the conundrum I posed in my recent post What if ...?

And it also applies to my next post ...

I love my previous aphorism ("Let the story tell itself or let the child tell it”), but it is time for a change ... my workplace doctor has even written our new one up on his office's whiteboard!

Aphorisms V

It doesn´t warrant top of the blog but I liked it it ...

¨Where do flies go in the wintertime? ... They end up in these empty spaces between the double-glazing. Look, I´ll show you, there are dozens of them here. Dead.¨

Charity, Leonard Deighton

Aphorisms IV

I like my current header aphorism so I am not going to change it yet.

However, I almost did with this one from Havellock Ellis. It is poignant. It has no wit. It verges on the Rumfeldesque. But it merits quotation.

"we seldom learn to go right except by going wrong, and we are often most wrong when we think we are most right".

... particularly given my recent comments on "youthful follies".

Aphorisms III

Our new header aphorism is from Querelle of Brest by Jean Genet (of whom more below). Previous header aphorisms:

“Man cannot purge his body of its theme
As can the silkworm on a running thread
Spin a shroud to reconsider in.”

Rite of Spring: Djuna Barnes

“An opinion is a limit to understanding”.

Natalie Barnie

“I reserve the right to go off topic and talk about anything I damn well like”

Andy at Ciskzereda Musings

Jean Genet - Querelle of Brest

Jean Genet´s “Querelle of Brest” became famous in the gay world when the German director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, made a film of the novel in the 1980s. The novel was first published in its original French in 1953, and in English in 1966. After seeing the film, I sought out the novel – I cannot say I understood it. It is a difficult novel that I am now rereading – even now I can only read two or three pages at a time.

But the following passage, in English translation, struck me as particularly poignant, although I cannot say I understand it all … just it is making me think …

“There exists, somewhere deep within us, a secret room with an armor-plated door. It contains, along with several poor caged dogs, other monsters of which the most alarming is the one that is to be found in the very middle of the room. This is the living reproach at the centre of our innermost being. Enclosed within a huge glass case, corresponding almost exactly to the shape of its body, this creature is mauve in colour and soft, almost gelatinous in substance. It would resemble a great fish, were it not for the very human sadness of its head. The keeper who watches over these monsters harbours the greatest contempt for this one, which, we know well, would find a degree of peace and comfort in the embrace of another of its own kind. But it has no like. The other monsters differ from it in a few minor details. It is lonely, unique, and yet it loves us. In hopeless, doggy devotion, it waits for a friendly look from us, one we shall never accord it.”

The creature in the middle of the room is murder. But why mauve, why a soft, gelatinous fish with a human head, why a glass case?

And has this anything to do with our leukaemia?

It is a beautiful piece of prose even in translation ...

Aphorisms II

I´m going to make the change of our title aphorisms semi-regular but so you don´t miss one I will make the announcement of a new aphorism a cumulative post. Latest first …

The newest aphorism in our header is from the Rite of Spring by Djuna Barnes.

Previous entries:

"An opinion is a limit to understanding".

Natalie Barnie

"I reserve the right to go off topic and talk about anything I damn well like".

Andy at Csikszereda Musings.

Aphorisms

Andy of Csikzereda Musings provided me with my original blog sub-title “I reserve the right to go off-topic and talk about anything I damned-well like”.

We have much in common – expats with no intention of leaving our adopted homes, young children – one “adopted” through our wife and one our own, working in the same institution in Portugal with a space between us of circa two years … and a love of foreign travel, cultures etc.

Thanks Andy for the loan of your words for the last few months.

An idea developed this weekend that I could make a collection of witty phrases and aphorisms when I come across those that seem wise and apt. To replace Andy’s, I will use one that is both wise and apt and perhaps, at the same time, somewhat glib and facile (courtesy of the 30 years deceased Natalie Barney).

Andy, I will put yours in our profile, and maybe change our sub-title aphorisms every few months and maybe make an online collection of them

If Oscar Wilde was alive, how would he use the Internet?

And, if you haven’t noticed, our new subtitle you will find above …