Aaron Haspel - Everything: A Book of Aphorisms

EVERYTHING A Book of Aphorisms Aaron Haspel 2015 by Aaron Haspel
Second Edition
ISBN: 0-692-58259-2
Published by Good Books. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Website: everything.aaronhaspel.com
Agent: Lynn Chu, To Lisa INTRODUCTION This book began with the recognition that I was the sort of writer, or at least wanted to do the sort of writing, best tolerated a sentence or two at a time. Books should rarely be read straight through, and reading this one at a sitting would be like eating the whole pint of ice cream. The gerundive classification scheme reflects my view that thought must eventually manifest in action to be of any use. I dont mean the vaunted man of action, who merely executes the instructions of sedentary men, usually long dead, whose very names he often does not know.

To provide the instructions is also to act. Aphorisms are often derided as trivial, yet most people rule their lives with four or five of them. The categories spill into each other, as in life. No book has ever been too short, and this one is no exception. La Rochefoucauld, the greatest of all aphorists, published about six hundred, mostly forgettable. From this collection I would have liked to remove the worst ten, if I could determine which they were.

Then I could have removed the next worst ten, and the next, until I had, instead of a book that is too long, no book at all. Among the dross some readers may find a few bits of gold, perhaps for each not the same few bits. SCHOOLING Manufacturing stupidity. Education is free: credentials are expensive. Defang a book by putting it on the syllabus, a painting by putting it in a museum, and a radical by putting him in the ministry. All intellectuals must begin as pseudo-intellectuals.

Of all the lies taught in school, the most vicious is that one ought to perform boring tasks diligently. The least forgiving pedant is the kindergartener in possession of a new fact. It never seems to occur to the teacher who complains of inattentive students that he may not be worth attending to. Americans take no interest in education but are obsessed with schooling. Nearly every field of human endeavor should be rescued from its admirers. Beware of any discipline that creates its own subject matter.

Some subjects are to be studied for their own sake, others for the immunity conferred against their adepts. The vaccination principle applies to education as well as to medicine. An above-average capacity for boredom is optimal; a superior one is disastrous. Every business dreams of answering "How much does it cost?" with "How much have you got?" Only college achieves it. The most effective way to learn is by devoting oneself to a single subject for months at a time. Its opposite is school.

A chief source of the worlds ills is that it is run largely by people who did well in school. A university whose science faculty taught all of its humanities courses would be operative; the reverse would be grotesque. First school spoils us for learning, and then jobs spoil us for work. An education is frequently confused with the flotsam one picks up on the way to acquiring it. Never before have so many spent so much time in school to so little purpose. READING The dead alive and busy.
Vaughan One reads so as not to believe everything one reads.

In hell you are forced to reread continuously all the books you loved before you were twenty. The self-justifying utterances of murderers, thieves, cowards, blowhards, and madmen all enter the quote books under Shakespeare. Many books are least likely to be read by the people who would profit most by reading them. Scholarship
Pompous: Magisterial
Unreliable: Brilliant
Trivial: Valuable
Deranged: Eccentric
Dull: Classic
Duller: Formidable
Stupefying: Encyclopedic There is little difference between collecting books and collecting porcelain elephants. To read well you have to live a little. We all know intimately many more fictional characters than real ones.

Reading old books leavens our fashionable prejudices with a few unfashionable ones. In fiction murderers and thieves often elicit the readers sympathy and understanding; snobs and ingrates elicit only his contempt. It takes half a lifetime to learn to read slowly. We say of indelible characters from life that they could be fictional; and from books, that they could be real. The reader properly resents coincidence. Life does not arrange itself to suit him; why should it arrange itself to suit the author? An unending series of plausible occurrences is impossible in life, and insisted on in fiction.

Reading an authors work for his life is like digging up a garden for manure. Cows chew cud, people read newspapers. We weep and blush for fictional characters, never with them. The reliable narrator is a literary convention. The worst hangover is the morning after you finish a bad book. Read to be contradicted.

The great American creeps are Poe and Whitman, and the great American bores are Emerson and Hemingway. The footnotes are the most important part of corporate annual reports, and the same is often true of non-fiction. Only the very cruelest novelists reproduce dialogue accurately. I have never known anyone book-smart, but book-stupid I see every day. One often hears complaints against morally improving books, as if it were better to be degraded by ones reading. One does not remember the books so much as become infused with them.

Reading, unless its for writing, is high-class idling. You stir up a lot of sunken knowledge when you reorganize your library. Unbending virtue dies on the page. Bores, prigs, hypocrites, blowhards, martinets these are the glories of world literature. Everyone who used to read is now too busy writing. We laugh at novels in which the weather tracks the moods of the characters, yet our own moods mostly track the weather.

News is noise. WRITING If it had been your exact thought you would have used my exact words. The ideal work environment for a writer is jail. Prose can hide every vice but vanity. No book has ever been too short. To be paid for opinions corrupts; and to be paid for particular opinions corrupts absolutely.

There are ways of putting things, and each way is a different thing. Surfeit: A group of poets. To make an epigram, invert a clich. More is lost in translation from thought to page than from one language to another. Any remark sufficiently clever will eventually be attributed to someone sufficiently famous. It is difficult to write even ten words without wasting one.

Always state the opposing view as persuasively as possible, not to be fair to your opponents but to demoralize them. No style guide can address the chief defect in writing, which is having nothing to say. The reader will often reject, when it is explained and argued for, what he would swallow if it were stated baldly and unadorned. If you write for any other reason than to discover what you think, you are just wasting everybodys time. Less garbage was written when it had to be written by hand. The ellipsis is the shuffling derelict of punctuation.

You may not get the size of audience you deserve, but you always get the kind. Omit, in order of ascending importance, superfluous words, sentences, paragraphs, articles, chapters, and books. To write is to attempt to assemble a serviceable cottage from the ruins of the castle of thought. Print overawes the illiterate just as machinery overawes the savage. One idea suffices for a book, for an essay, for an aphorism. Ignorance prevents plagiarism but does not confer originality.

The author who displays his library is like the suspect who leads police to the scene of the crime. Good critics do not have good taste. They have articulate, consistent taste for which the reader can correct. Minor masterpiece: What critics call a book they think they might have written themselves with a few more evenings and weekends free. Read a lot: think some: write a little. People speak and write in clichs because they see and think in them.