Aphorisms and Paradoxes

The Famous Then Forgotten Dead

2009-10-22T01:45:18Z

For a few days after we die, more people think of us simultaneously than ever did while we were living. Friends not seen for seven years drive seven hours for our funeral. Neighbors remember us to each other while raking their yards. Church ladies compliment our common qualities as rare virtues. Reading our name in newspapers, the whole town sighs for us over breakfast. In a week, the talk is moving on to other topics, and, being dead, we are powerless ever to call attention back to ourselves again.

Our names burn out like light bulbs, briefly flashing before going black.

Repression Makes Sex Interesting

2009-10-13T01:07:34Z

A mere ankle used to arouse a man, but now midriffs, thongs, and cleavage barely wake men's sluggish lust—free appetizers shoveled upon the plates of the sated.

Despite our condescension toward Victorian prudery, repression bred a more intriguing sexual world than modern looseness and liberation. Scorned by morality, desire crept beneath gentility. Sexuality, like the proper name of God in Judaism, was never spoken of yet permeated the mind. A Victorian bachelor, bursting with decades of pent passion, fought the daily inner war of being a gentleman with genitals. Contrast the silly stars of modern television, quenching their lust as mindlessly as mounted monkeys. Promiscuity blunts their pleasure's edge, just as drunkards taste their liquor least. What do rock stars sampling women's bodies nightly know of the sex drive? Fasters, not feasters, feel hunger's ferocity.

Similarly, high school sexuality is more interesting than college sexuality because the colossal urges and instincts of adolescence are checked and impeded by the lingering authorities of parents, teachers, and principals. High school sex is secrets and sneaking out and dark back seats, while in college the reins are clipped and the goat of instinct rushes headlong into debauchery. Sexuality loses its tension and, with it, its worthiness of attention.

Great forces are best revealed against their opposites. Sex needs repression as a storm wave needs a sea wall.

Activity and Depression

2009-09-20T02:49:10Z

Doctors recommend physical activity as a treatment for depression. Souls are like airplanes, they must keep moving in order not to crash.

Full Schedules Make Empty Lives

2009-09-18T21:48:47Z

The busier I get, the more senseless my life seems, but the less time I have to worry about it. Galloping to keep up with my calendar, tripping over appointments, occasionally I glimpse the absurdity of the frantic life. The only purpose of today is to check off yesterday's to-do list, and create tomorrow's. My overactive mind scarcely stops to let me sleep, yet my thoughts add up to mindlessness, since I never pause to notice I am living. My gluttony of plans fosters a famine of purpose. Did man evolve for this—to walk upright through a worker ant's life?

Luckily, my vision of existential absurdity is cut short by my next approaching deadline. Busyness is the cause, and cure, of a pointless life.

Mozart as Elevator Music

2009-09-16T01:53:31Z

It must grieve dead composers that their symphonies and concertos are regarded by the masses as perfectly suited for background music. The compositions worthiest of analysis go not only unanalyzed but almost unheard, merely filling awkward silence in elevators and waiting rooms, or setting a mood for sipping cocktails or making love. Subtlety and complexity in art sadly tend to undermine themselves. They cost more labor with less effect. They are hard to notice, in proportion as they are hard to create.

Free Time, Money, and Health

2009-09-03T01:06:56Z

To do what one likes requires free time, money, and health. Children have health and free time but no money. Adults have health and money but no free time. The old have money and free time but no health.

The Poignancy of the Particular

2009-08-07T01:45:31Z

Today while reading a book by Santayana, acquired from my late grandfather's library, I found an old hotel receipt folded in fourths.

Park Royal Hotel
23 W 73rd Street
New York, NY
Mr. O.E. Stimpson
Apartment 1214
$15.75
PAID
July 21, 1961

Scenting the past on musty paper, I suddenly saw my grandfather, not much older than I am now, reading Santayana by his hotel window, above the muffled shouts and beeping of New York streets. He marks his place with his receipt, but fifty years later, I, not he, resume his reading. A crumbling receipt is a durable memento precisely through not intending to be. Posed photographs of my grandfather merely link me to his generic representation, but a dated scrap of paper captures the real man, caught unawares in a moment of casual existence.

Likewise, antiquity's great monuments are not as touching as the hair combs, spoons, and wash basins dug up from buried villages by archaeologists. By recalling the dead in their ordinary lives, the least significant objects make the most significant memorials. Time hallows our ancestors' routines into our relics.

Modern Astronomy is Behind the Times

2009-07-20T00:38:08Z

The light of stars must travel so far and takes so long to reach us that we see the cosmos not as it is, but as it was eons ago when the light now arriving first left its source. Thus, we have no idea what is happening out there right now. All astronomical discoveries are stale reportage. Stars die as scientists witness their birth. For all we know, doomsday has already come to the far side of space, and it will be ten billion years before news of it crosses the wires. We are like generals in old wars, who had to wait for updates to travel hundreds of miles by courier to army headquarters. Often, by the time the message came that the ranks were holding strong, luck had turned and the fort lay in enemy hands.

City Rudeness

2009-06-30T02:00:43Z

On a recent day trip to Chicago, I observed a pervasive mood of impatience and anger. Weary of the wastelands of cornfields I had driven through, at first I relished the city's crush of cars and humanity. Yet, parsing the cacophony, horn-blowing was constant to the point of absurdity. Any driver's minor mistake was met by ruthless honking from ten directions. Impatient taxis seemed to demand the death of pedestrians, honking at cars who refused to run over them at crosswalks. Meanwhile, the sidewalks were turbulent rivers of humans in hurries, all of whom looked annoyed at having to dodge the rocks and rapids of each other. Annoyed myself, by day's end I regarded rudeness not as a trait of Chicagoans but as the inevitable result of living in cities, where everyone is always in your way.

We cannot live happily apart from our fellow men nor among them. We perish of boredom in the country and of fury in the city.

Getting Dead and Being Dead

2009-06-26T01:50:46Z

If I could be dead without having to die, fetched in sleep to my new home of nothingness, I would not mind mortality as much. Conversely, could I die without ending up dead, I would bear my disease or drowning bravely, swabbing my pain with my plans for tomorrow. But to exit life via life's most wretched experience is a poor favor fate has paid us. Getting dead and being dead, like gang members or annoying couples, are more tolerable individually. The problem with each is the other.

The Unlegislative Branch

2009-06-11T01:25:33Z

Politics is the complex process by which leaders don't make decisions.

Life is High-Maintenance

2009-06-09T01:30:42Z

Most of every day is not spent living, but maintaining the machine of life. Merely to make our motors run, we must power them down eight hours every night. We lose another eight hours in cubicles, working to earn money to eat, eating to get energy to go back to work. In the evenings, we all keep second jobs as janitors, clipping and scrubbing the ever-emerging chaos of shabby beards, shabby lawns, browning teeth, and sprawling toenails. Finally, for one blessed hour before bed, we get a book or guitar and do what we want instead of what we must. One hour of the day is the raison d'être of the other twenty-three. Who would buy a car that needed twenty-three hours in the shop for each hour's drive?

War Above Water

2009-05-21T01:52:33Z

To the hazards all wars hold, World War II in the Pacific added the ocean's instability. A foot soldier in France, though fired at, felt the solace of solid ground. A bomber shot down over Belgium could parachute into a cornfield. War and water are two chaoses combined. On the sea's meadow, there is no trench to crouch in, no building to gather thoughts while shots pause. Battling midway between continents, the element is as frightening as the enemy. A fighter pilot sputtering through pierced and cracking air, wings burning, sees only blue below to match the blue above. His terra firma is a speck of ship deck floating on the deep. In modern naval war he glimpses the chaos before creation—air, water, and fire, but no earth.

Travel Proves the Merits of Home

2009-05-08T01:33:32Z

Although I often yearn for the wide life of travel, traveling is a poor road to go seeking more wealth of experience. As soon as I reach my new coordinates, I feel the inescapable shallowness of travel. I have no friends in this exotic place, no history, no job, am a member of no gardening club or church committee. I do not go to dinner parties but watch them through windows on solitary walks. I have not entered life but left it. Traveler's anomie points my yearning homeward, back to the place where I am a node in society's network, linked to life by the rich rhythms of my routines, where every street and building remind me of something I did once, where my experience, if narrower, is deeper. The same desire to participate in life that led me from home, leads me back home.

The joy of traveling is to be where you haven't been. The joy of home is to be where you have always been. Thus we destroy the joy of traveling by attaining it, since visiting the unknown makes it known, but we deepen the joy of home by being home, since every year adds fibers to our roots.

We love where we live and lust where we don't. Home is our wife, travel is our mistress. We boomerang on brief adulteries to faraway places, seeking their elegance, fleeing their emptiness.

Waking to Weather

2009-04-13T01:56:53Z

Last night I returned home from vacation. Not having checked the local forecast, and arriving after dark, I could not tell the weather conditions except for the temperature. This morning I woke to a gray, dreary sky, humid air, intermittent rain, and moderate warmth. This waking to unknown weather recalled my experience of weather in childhood, when I had no knowledge of forecasts. Each day was a distinct world divided by the curtain of night, and I never knew what was coming. Reversing unpredictably from dry to drenched or calm to blustery, weather had an arbitrary and absolute character—not part of a causal nexus but a fate handed down. I submitted to the sky utterly, making its mood my mood, imagining life only within its limits.

In adulthood, broadening my knowledge has localized the weather. I anticipate cold or heat waves, recognize this overcast sky as a frontal system exiting the region by tomorrow. In dry weather, I am conscious of the rain falling in places I could drive to. In winter I think of Australia's summer. Great thunderstorms which once rattled the whole world now seem small because my thoughts fly to the storm cell's edge, where the clear sky eastward dwarfs the blackness behind.

There is a comfort in the memory of my childhood acquiescence to weather. I would like, again, to be ignorant of the weather, so I could wake surprised and submissive to each day, believing the here and now were the whole of life. Knowledge of other possibilities has fragmented my adult consciousness. I am nowhere, through being too aware of everywhere.