#essays and aphorisms

[funeral]

All this means, to be sure, that life can be regarded as a dream and death as the awakening from it: but it must be remembered that the personality, the individual, belongs to the dreaming and not to the awakened consciousness, which is why death appears to the individual as annihilation. In any event, death is not, from this point of view, to be considered a transition to a state completely new and foreign to us, but rather a return to one originally our own from which life has been only a brief absence. Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

[elysiumwhispers]

decided to make a book list on here to keep track of books ive read recently that i enjoyed:

Nausea-Sartre

Quicksand-Junichiro Tanizaki

Sputnik Sweetheart- Murakami

Heaven- Meiko Kawakami

Essays and Aphorisms- Schopenhauer

The Stranger / The Plague - Camus

The Inseparables- Beavoir

Notes from Underground- Dostoevsky

[agirlnamedbone]

James Richardson | Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays | 2001

[soulmaking]

"Most of us in this busy world are far more interested in what we can learn to do than in what we can hope to become."

Agnes Repplier, "The Passing of the Essay"

[thepersonalwords]

If the idea of loving those whom you have been taught to recognize as your enemies is too overwhelming, consider more deeply the observation that we are all much more alike than we are unalike.

Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

[mthomasapple]

Dear Diary - Posts from the Past

I’ve kept a journal (OK, a diary) for many, many years now. It first started in September 1984 as a junior high school 1st year (7th grade) English assignment — each day, we would be given a writing prompt and at the end of the 10-week term (quarterly system back then), the English teacher would look it over and write feedback. At least, that was the idea. In mid-October my family moved to a…

[homunculus-argument]

regardless of this girl's personal likeilhood of it or whatever (which to be clear i think you have a better chance of being right about than a bunch of strangers), im just annoyed that so many people are even treating the deliberate "i don't get it" tactic like a hypothetically appropriate response.

in a PHILOSOPHY CLASS.

where everyone would already be discussing and interpreting the aphorism.

like, this isnt "your friend told a sexist joke, so you should stare at him until hes forced to reckon with what he even finds funny about it." this is a CLASS TOPIC.

what these folks are suggesting is the equivalent of like... getting assigned "write an essay about beauty standards" and just turning in a single sheet of paper that says "i don't understand. ALL women are beautiful"

I mean, odds are that these folks would 100% do literally exactly what you described in that situation. And then whine on tumblr about how they shouldn't have to defend their point if they're right.

[aaknopf]

The letters of the writer and groundbreaking neurological investigator Oliver Sacks–now collected in a volume that displays on every page his boundless curiosity and love of the human animal in its myriad ways of perceiving the world–include several to the poet W. H. Auden, among other literary lights. We unfortunately have no record of the Coleridge quote Sacks refers to in this missive to Auden of August 18, 1971, but the line he mentions from the German Romantic poet Novalis was surely a favorite aphorism of Oliver’s: “Every disease is a musical problem; its care a musical solution.” We also share below the typescript of Auden’s poem “Anthem,” which the poet had enclosed in his foregoing letter to Sacks, written on August 2, where he ended by saying: “Overleaf a little poem about the Cosmos. Yours ever, Wystan.”

Letter to W. H. AudenAugust 18,1971 [37 Mapesbury Rd., London]

Dear Wystan,

Your letter was forwarded to me a few days ago, and it (or your poem, or you) was the best of palliatives. Does there come a point (if one is very lucky, or has the right gifts, or grace, or works at it) when style, feeling, content, judgement all flow together and assume the right form? Your “Anthem” seems instinctively and effortlessly lyrical, and absolutely natural, like an organic growth; and yet obviously has the most careful and sophisticated and exquisite choice of words—and no feeling of any “joins” anywhere, of artifice, of manipulation. Marvellous. I will treasure it.      Yes, I thought the Coleridge quote was a real find, and so to the point. And I agree (I feel) absolutely with the Novalis one. In some sense, I think, my medical sense is a musical one. I diagnose by the feeling of discordancy, or of some peculiarity of harmony. And it’s immediate, total, and gestalt. My sleeping-sickness patients have innumerable types of strange “crises,” immensely complex, absolutely specific, yet completely indescribable. I recognize them all now as I recognize a bar of Brahms or Mahler. And so do the patients. Such strange physiological harmonies—I hope I can find some way to describe these, because they are unique states, at the edges of being, beyond imaginable being, beneath comprehension, and when the last of the sleeping-sickness patients die (they are very old now) no memory will be left of their extraordinary states. Writing seems more of a struggle now—maybe I’m trying something harder—I find meanings go out of focus, or there is some sort of “slippage” between word and meaning, and the phrase which seemed right, yesterday, is dead today. [. . .] And medical jargon is so awful. It conveys no real picture, no impression whatever, of what—say—it feels like to be Parkinsonian. And yet it’s an absolutely specific, and intolerable feeling. A feeling of confinement, but of an inner constraint and confinement and cramp and crushedness, which is closely analogous to depression (although it is not emotional as such), and, of course, is very depressing. And a painful inner conflict—one patient called it the push-and-pull, another the goad-and-halter. It’s a most hateful condition, although it has a sort of elegant formal structure. But no book that I know of brings home that Parkinsonism feels like this—they just reduce it to an unevocative listing of symptoms. I hope Osbert Sitwell didn’t have it too badly.       I’ve been reading some Goethe (for the first time, really) in the last week or two. Starting with his Italian Journey—thank God I did start with that, or I might not have got any further. And then the Pelican Faust—maybe it’s the same with any translation. I must learn German. And Mann’s fabulous essay on Goethe and Tolstoy. And Elective Affinities. And that great, meandering, affectionate Lewes biography. There is one point (I think in his chapter on Goethe’s philanthropy) where Lewes says that he could “eat Goethe for love”—and I think these are beginning to be my sentiments too.       I hope I can join Orlan on a lightning visit to Vienna. There is nothing I would like more, but I am awfully fretted with my current book, and may not be at liberty (or feel myself at liberty) until I have finished it. I would love to see you in your own Kirchstetten, but if I cannot come I will surely see you in New York a few weeks later. 

Yours ever, [Oliver]

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Letters by Oliver Sacks.

Read “Anthem” and more of W. H. Auden’s poems in Collected Poems. 

Browse other books by Oliver Sacks and follow the Oliver Sacks Foundation on Instagram @oliversacksfdn.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

[capricciosso]

James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-second Essays [for #samweek2025; thank you @suncaptor and @seasononesam for organizing!]

[nousrose]

The scenes in our life resemble pictures in a rough mosaic; they are ineffective from close up, and have to be viewed from a distance if they are to seem beautiful. That is why to attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and why, though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving as the only road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have been living the whole time ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely that in expectation of which they lived.

Essays and Aphorisms

Arthur Schopenhauer

[bimboficationblues]

End of Year Book Report

The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson: rules, worthy of an insane effortpost but I want to read the other two first.

Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno: one of the great works of theory and literature of the 20th century. reading it as a conventional philosophy text - that is trying to persuade or unfold a systemic argument - seems wrongheaded to me, not just because of the aphorism form but because as the text unfolds, it becomes clear that Adorno is wrestling with not just a description of the political and economic situation of modernity in the wake of fascism and the Shoah, but himself. he is digging into his subjectivity as a person who has been deeply wounded over and over by life, his sense of complicity as an intellectual and a refugee and a subject of capitalist modernity, his survivor's guilt, his sense that all the good in the world has betrayed and destroyed itself for nothing, balanced against a lingering, earnest utopianism. it is raw and honest in a way that is sometimes unflattering and often challenging, but just as often compelling.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville: rules. it's so awesome that there was just a Calvinist in the 19th century who happened to write a postmodernist novel. I think the first two thirds are strongest. once it gets to the section where the crew just keeps encountering different ships and their respective crews, it didn't grip me as much - chiefly because Ishmael's very distinct voice becomes more reserved in his commentary - but the ending is quite strong.

Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life: a very good biography! pretty even-keeled and neutral-positive on its subject, and does a good job of portraying how a variety of people can both love and despise the guy personally and politically. ultimately I came away with a mix of admiration and disappointment. it's easy to read Robespierre as teleologically determined towards his particular end - indeed, this is how literally all of his enemies and critics talk about him - but I think McPhee does a good job of depicting the historical contingencies AND specific values that led Robespierre to make increasingly compromised or ill-conceived political decisions. definitely not a pop-history biography, it really plunges you into the material - which I think was fine for me after taking a lot of notes on the F.Rev for months, but might make it a tough introductory rec.

Normal People: I know this was bigger (and contentious) a while back, but I decided to pick it up because of the author's recent writings on Palestine which I thought were incredibly forceful. It's good! I think the characterizations I'd seen of it as just boring rich people with no problems talking about literature were completely unfair and inaccurate. it was definitely a triggering book for me, not sure I'd be able to read it again, but that was also kind of a resonant quality about it - as a person who has been romantically entangled with abused people and had complicated feelings about that, it really landed. It's sort of like, intellectualized schlock, but I mean that positively - but that does mean it has it moments where the schlock pokes through (most notably the resolution). also the anti-BDSM digression is kind of an eyeroll but I also kind of get it.

Climate Leviathan: this was interesting! like a lot of Verso books it’s a little bit of a make-work project, the authors’ previous essays given book-like form, but the essays are generally good. sobering stuff (the book “Climate Wars” sounds like it has a similar thrust) about the coming shifts in the security state in defense of capitalist civilization and order, positing a supranational (or quasi-supranational, more likely) body that will assume the role of determining which parts of the world receive the bulk of the warming mitigation strategies like geoengineering - assuming we don’t all collapse into fascist localism. It does have some weird pointless digressions, but I thought it still had a lot to say.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel: it's okay. I was very engrossed in the melodrama and the non-linear structure, weaving back and forth between the pre-apocalypse and post-apocalypse. but the ending is really schmaltzy which soured me on it.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith: this book sucks, someone in my reading group (possibly edwad) described Smith as a "summarizer" and that's basically correct, he's just cobbling together completely inconsistent positions from a variety of sources (Hobbes, Aristotle, Hume, Grotius, etc). only really interesting as like an artifact of bourgeois thought and the rhetoric of political economy, which sees property as the method by which to encourage civility and propriety. this book honestly makes me kind of mad.

Books I Started But Haven't Finished

Cassandra's Daughter by Joseph Schwartz: really interesting piece of intellectual history about the development of psychoanalytic theory, primarily from the clinical angle. contextualizes Freud in the broader Viennese political and cultural milieu with some fascinating details I never came upon elsewhere, like the extensive network of socialists and feminists who were connected to Freud and his earliest patients. I bailed to this after briefly reading Marshall and Black's "Freud and Beyond" because that ended up being more of like a summary of major psychoanalytic concepts, which was not what I wanted. I've only read a few chapters but am hoping to pick it back up in the new year.

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith: definitely more tolerable and worthwhile than Theory of Moral Sentiments but Smith is such an annoying doofus it killed my reading group for months.

Capital, Vol I by Karl Marx: I am really enjoying going through the new translation with a group. I think the introductory materials and scholarly additions in the endnotes are incredibly strong and the translation achieves its goal, in my opinion, of making the book overall more readable while simultaneously making some of the more complex ideas (particularly around the value-form) more alienating in a way that invites you to wrestle with it rather than be overwhelmed.

Mort by Terry Pratchett: frequently laugh-out-loud funny. the story itself is a little twee for my liking but I can't say I am not enjoying it. just need a free afternoon to tear through the second half.

[garadinervi]

«Money and rain belong together. The weather itself is an index of the state of this world. Bliss is cloudless, knows no weather. There also comes a cloudless realm of perfect goods, on which no money falls.» ― Walter Benjamin; in Joshua Clover, Madonna anno domini. Poems, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, LA and London, 1997

Bibl.: Walter Benjamin, Reflections. Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, [One-Way Street (selection)], Edited and with an Introduction by Peter Demetz, Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, NY, 1978, p. 87

[agirlnamedbone]

James Richardson | Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays | 2001

[ontologicaltorment]

Out in the street, suddenly overcome by the “mystery” of Time, I told myself that Saint Augustine was quite right to deal with such a theme by addressing himself directly to God: with whom else to discuss it?

Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms

[ellevandersneed]

hey I just wanted to say that I loved your 3 hour long video essay on this nuanced political topic, do you mind if I distill it into 3-4 truncated aphorisms devoid of context?

[fashionbooksmilano]

Style File The World's most elegant dressed

Iké Udé aRUDE Magazine

Foreword by Valerie Steele Introduction by Harold Koda

Collins, New York 2008, 224 pages,26x33,5cm, ISBN 9780061464201

euro 100,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

Iké Udé's Style File is a remarkable volume that profiles more than 55 of the most influential arbiters of style in the world today. With a foreword by Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at F.I.T., and an introduction by Harold Koda, curator-in-charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this beautifully designed book provides an intimate perspective on these unique and influential men and women, offering frank insight to their views on fashion and life through evocative interviews and lush photography. Included among the many notable designers, artists, and public figures are John Galliano, Oscar de la Renta, Carolina Herrera, Isabel and Ruben Toledo, Victoire de Castellane, André Leon Talley, Dita Von Teese, Francesco Clemente, Christian Louboutin, Diane von Furstenberg, Lapo Elkann, Frédéric Malle, Hamish Bowles, Scott Schuman, Romeo Gigli and Lara Aragno, Seidou Keïta, Iris Apfel and many others.

Style File also features numerous editorial features that deepen the book's exploration of enduring style. Annotated photo albums examine the work of premier style-making photographers such as Scavullo, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Coreen Simpson, Seydou Keïta, and Maripol. Illustrated essays including those by journalist and professor Nicholas Boston on the popular blog The Sartorialist and by George Pitts, associate chair of photography at the Parsons School of Design, on the Motown Look explore a range of fashion eras, influences, and influencers, from the Belle Epoque to the late visionary stylist Isabella Blow. Evocative archival and portrait photography of fashion legends from Marchesa Casati to Diana Vreeland, select aRude fashion editorials that point to recurring themes in the intertwined cultural-political-style landscape, and style-related aphorisms are featured throughout. This comprehensive, gorgeous book is a rich exploration of personal style that belongs in every well-dressed library.

03/05/24