The Diary of an Aphorisiac

By Claudis Weyser

Are you an aphorisiac? You probably are but don’t realize it. An aphorism is a short pithy statement. And an aphorisiac is a lover of those statements. Everyone is an aphorist because every thought is an aphorism. We think, therefore we aphorize.

Aphorisms are usually thought of as the literary brevities found on a desk calendar. But aphorisms are changing. We are a society addicted to brevity, where the dot point has replaced the paragraph, the tweet has replaced the sentence, the email has replaced the letter, the blog has replaced the essay and the five second bite has replaced the speech. The aphorism is now center stage, no longer in the literary wings. We have become aphorisiacs.

This book is a collection of new aphorisms. Aphorisms have been freed, and in this collection the new aphorism appears. This is a modern tale of brevity, the Diary of an Aphorisiac. It is a modern book of the wisdoms of an observer. Just a sample:

DEMOCRACY
All humans must be on a leash. It’s called democracy.

THE CONTRL FREAK
You cannot, but I can.
You will not, but I will.
You are, but I am not.
I, and I alone, am.

CONDESCENSION
When the partial information you know becomes the full information you don’t know.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483504827

Book preview

The Diary of an Aphorisiac

Claudis Weyser

To all the mockingbirds

INTRODUCTION

Everyone is an aphorist. Every thought is an aphorism. Thoughts are usually too random to write down; but they are still aphorisms. We think, therefore we aphorize.

Thinking is aphoristic because our mind does not admit any other. We do not think in paragraphs; or in sections; or in chapters; or as a complete work. We think in bits, in bytes, in images. We think small to frame the large. We think as we have to think. We think aphoristically.

Aphorisms are usually thought of as the literary brevities found on a desk calendar, at the beginning of a chapter, or as the insertions by one writer of the words of another. They are the examples of writing so distilled as to maximize the impact. But aphorisms are changing. We are a society addicted to brevity and to short-term impact, where the dot point has replaced the paragraph, the tweet has replaced the sentence, the email has replaced the letter, the blog has replaced the essay and the five second bite has replaced the speech. The aphorism is now center stage, no longer in the literary wings. We have all become aphorisiacs.

In categorizing the aphorisms of the past, Geary¹ emphasized that an aphorism had to be brief, definitive, personal, philosophical, and…to have an inversion. The most quoted aphorisms are those of the geniuses of mockery, who observe, distill and mock. But the aphorism is embedded in most literature and most literary forms. Aphorisms are philosophical transformations; they transform thoughts into philosophy. Some writers, for example, Shestov, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, have used aphorisms to compile their entire philosophy.

The present book is a collection of new aphorisms, written to represent contemporary thoughts and contemporary aphoristic tendencies. Aphorisms do not have to be restricted to single sentences; they can also be long paragraphs, or one or two pages of reflection, or dot points, emails and tweets. Aphorisms have been freed, and in this collection the new aphorism is explored. But the greatest challenge in compiling a book of aphorisms is to order them. Our thoughts are random, and our aphorisms are random. That is the case whether the aphorisms are written by many writers or by one writer. Aphorisms in this collection appear in a number of variations.

The traditional single quote

The ordered aphorism

The contemporary (dot points, memos, blogs, emails)

The short essay

The essay based on another work

Briefly, some examples chosen from The Diary of an Aphorisiac.

Single quotes appear throughout the book; as in Chapter 7

It’s not what you know, but who you know. However, the two you need to know most, God and yourself, you may never know.

The single quote is the traditional aphorism, but not the only way to maximize the impact of words. Orderings are a form of maximizing the impact of words. Consider

The life cycle of a butterfly

Egg, larva, pupa, adult.

The life cycle of a frog

Egg, tadpole, froglet, frog

The life cycle of a star

Nebula, star, supernova, black hole

The life cycle of a firm

Start up, IPO, merger, insolvency

The life cycle of an economy

Expansion, boom, contraction, bust

The life cycle of a networker

Hermit, pre-networker, networker, hermit

The life cycle of a celebrity

Hermit, star, superstar, hermit

The life cycle of a politician

Hermit, pre-spin, spin, spin hermit

There is a life cycle for us all.

This aphorism connects the unconnected, and shows that the ordering of disconnected lives is similar. The observation is highlighted through simplicity, the simplicity of the cycle.  Simplicity is central to an aphorism.

The use of contemporary methods is elevated in the book, for example the use of dot points as in this example from Chapter 7

Life is a series of dot points.

Date of birth

Date of death

Every other dot point is up to you.

This aphorism transforms life into a template many edit every day.

The short essay is often aphoristic as in the essay from Chapter 2, And What Have You Achieved?

"Every minute of every day we write our own performance appraisal. For some it is called their conscience; for others their arrogance; for others their meaninglessness. And then, at the end of our lives, someone else does the appraisal; an obituary, a testament, but not an appraisal by the one who knows us best. Each day, millions open their newspaper to read the births, deaths, celebrations and obituaries; the markings of our time. If only there was a section for self-appraisals

‘John Citoyen hereby submits his five-yearly performance appraisal. In the past five years, John Citoyen has married, had two children, divorced, formed a famille recomposé, built a house with a home theatre room, had two vacations, paid $161,000 in tax, had a carbon footprint on average of 10.3 hectares, and helped one person he didn’t need to help. John Citoyen submits that he has achieved two standard deviations more than the average citizen.’

Submitted in the public interest

But there may be only one reader each day, such is the public interest."

The short essay is an extended aphorism, and the book is replete with them. This book takes titles of the past and transforms them into aphorisms. Beginning with To Kill a Mockingbird and The Geniuses of Mockery, books and their themes are revisited in the form of short essays. The literary themes of the past are aphorized to the present.

An Introduction to any book should be brief but an Introduction to a book of aphorisms even briefer. Aphorisms can never really be introduced; only quoted and misquoted.  The aphorisiac must aphorize.  So in brief…

Chapter 1

The Amorphous Aphorism

Freedom

Freedom defines the individual; restraint defines their worth.

Growth

In order to attain a global minimum, we all must maximize.

Group think

Group think is the jury of our times. There is no foreman, no jury room, no judge; only a verdict. But the verdict is often wrong because the group has no reasonable doubts about itself.

Sorry

Sorry means little when said too late. Sorry means little when said too often. Saying sorry is a difficult problem. You are sorry if you get it wrong.

Phobias

Everyone has a portfolio of phobias, but to minimize risk we don’t know whether to increase or decrease the portfolio.

The rationalist

A rationalist is one who forecasts rationally; all except their own irrationality.

Fibonacci sequence

War is like a Fibonacci sequence. A first war plus a second war usually equals a third war.

To kill a mockingbird

It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. They don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

Harper Lee wrote only one book, but with a thousand variations.  Mockingbirds exist everywhere. They are the ones who sing for others, but are not listened to… until later.  They sing for difference and against standardization. They sing for innocence and against the cynical. They sing for compassion and against dispassion. But they don’t sing like a bird. They sing through struggle, through writing, through existence; and sometimes through death. But they always sing for others. They are mockingbirds.

Mockingbirds admit many forms. They don’t flock together and never will. They will always be identified as mockingbirds, not by their markings, but by their voice. Their voice is not distracted by the voices of others. It is the voice of singularity penetrating intolerance. If there were a chorus of mockingbirds, it would probably include:

Jesus who sang for those without hope.

Abraham Lincoln who sang for the enslaved.

Edith Cavell who sang for the merciful.

Karen Silkwood who sang for those who wouldn’t.

Oscar Wilde who sang for the persecuted.

Anne Frank who sang for the imprisoned.

Veronica Guerin who sang for the incorruptible.

Martin Luther King who sang for the oppressed.

It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. They don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.

The geniuses of mockery

Mockery is as old as the first man, or at least the first stumble of the first man. But, as mockery evolved, the geniuses of mockery recognized it was institutions that should be mocked, not individuals. The geniuses of mockery understood mockery to be a risk management problem, formally stated as maximizing the risk of those they mock while minimizing the risk to themselves.  They invoked three principles

Mock the unmockable and not the mockable.

Mock to unlock that which should be unlocked.

Don’t kill the mockingbird.

Voltaire, one of the geniuses of mockery, understood these principles better than most. Voltaire did not mock the unfortunate; the family Calas, Pierre-Paul Sirven, and Chevalier de la Barre were championed by Voltaire (Thaddeus, Genius of Mockery, 1928). Instead he mocked the institutions, the Church and the Monarchy; he unlocked the excesses of both while protecting the mockingbird. And what unlocking was achieved! A revolution thirteen years after his death satisfying his prescient hope One day, all will be well-this is our hope. All is well today-this is illusion! (Thaddeus, p.269).

Wilde, another genius of mockery, understood these principles. On education, he wrote Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. Students of modern education would understand. And on the aristocracy, there is always more brass than brains in an aristocracy. The aristocracy would understand. But Wilde failed to minimize his risks in other directions. A genius of mockery is not necessarily a genius of life.

Of course, the highest test becomes self-mockery. When you mock yourself, the risk is that others believe it, or that it reinforces their opinion of you. Self-mockery is like a stock take of the excess in our lives. In self-mockery, one must always mock the outer and not the inner self; that is, the outer part which you are prepared to trade-off in another life; such as ….and….. and…..and…..and…… but not me.

I appear to have stumbled here; so back to mocking everything and everyone else.

One second of fame

Sometimes I consider a thought experiment called fame. Suppose there were a giant screen that could be observed simultaneously by all people on earth every second of the day. It would be like a sun operating night and day but, rather than emit heat and light, it would show one person’s face each second; and a different face every second. How long before every person on earth would have their one second of fame? Well, with a current population of seven billion, it would take approximately 250 years for every one’s face to be displayed. Even if the screen showed four faces at once, it would still take sixty years for every person to be seen, and many of them would have died by then. And would anyone be watching?

Those who want fame choose other mechanisms. They choose to differentiate themselves from the herd; by the biggest.., the smallest.., the noisiest.., the...; any attribute that will be noticed on the screen. This screen, bien sûr, excludes the wisest, the kindest, the most philosophical, the most insightful…because those are attributes which will never be noticed on our screen. But that is just our screen and not the screen that does see everything. That’s the screen which monitors lifetimes, not just the one second or the fifteen minutes. That’s the screen where every second counts. That’s the screen where there are no paparazzi, no celebrity pages, and no celebrity followers. That’s the screen which measures the you only you know. It’s the screen with the clearest resolution.

On a scale of one to ten

Birth

On a scale of one to ten how did you rate your birth

On a scale of one to ten how did we rate your birth

Education

On a scale of one to ten how did you rate your education

On a scale of one to ten how did we rate your education

Interaction with others

On a scale of one to ten how did you rate your interaction with others

On a scale of one to ten how did we rate your interaction with others

Exercise

On a scale of one to ten how did you rate your exercise programs

On a scale of one to ten how did we rate your exercise program

Pain

On a scale of one to ten how did you rate your pain

On a scale of one to ten how did we rate your pain

Your life

On a scale of one to ten how did you rate your life

On a scale of one to ten how did we rate your life

The ordinal scale of the ordinary life

I wonder where they are now

How many do we meet in a lifetime? By the time I was five, I suppose I had met a couple of hundred. By now, it must be into the hundreds of thousands. When I say met, I mean interacted with, in the streets, in the bush, on the trains, in the bookshops; not necessarily spoken to, just an interaction necessary