Social media, these days, burgeons with such words of wisdom, floating around on a sea of hashtags, usually misattributed, and frequently accompanied by photos of sunsets over beaches. So are we living in a golden age of aphorisms? They are, after all, well suited to a 280-character limit, and positively beg to be shared.
“You’d think so,” says the poet and aphorist Don Paterson. “But there’s absolutely no evidence of it.” As he sees it, the aphorism is a different thing altogether from what he calls “wisdom literature”. He adds: “Temperamentally, [social media] is unsuited to the inspirational quote.”
Yet aphorisms – even though they haven’t much of a tradition in the anglophone world – are poking green shoots into the likes of Waterstone’s. In recent months, we’ve seen Paterson’s The Fall At Home: New and Collected Aphorisms, Yahia Lababidi’s Where Epics Fail: Meditations to Live By, and Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments, described by its publisher as “at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms, but the pieces reveal themselves as a masterful arrangement that steadily gathers power”.
So far, I had found the European influence in Quebec’s largest city quite charming: the chatter of French in cafes; the freshly baked brioche for breakfast; the murmur of street-side jazz wafting through the summer air. But, although I’d usually consider it admirable, the one European sensibility I was currently not enjoying was the pronounced dearth of air conditioning. I had arrived in the middle of one of Montreal’s worst heatwaves in decades.
I raised the bottle and poured its contents into a frosted mug. The clear, effervescent brew had scarcely foamed to the top before it was at my lips. As I eagerly took my first sip, I was immediately hit with the unmistakable, biting taste of conifer – like a liquefied Christmas tree. This was my first bière d'épinette, or spruce beer.
Despite being both evil and incompetent, stormtroopers have become a beloved icon. Their design is so brilliant, so instantly memorable, that it’s now as recognizable as Mickey Mouse or the Superman logo. With help from a Star Wars costume designer and some experts in the field, we decided to find out why.
Rules are rules. They exist for a reason. They are meant to be obeyed.
If, for instance, you are going to adopt or foster an Earthling child, you have to obey certain rules. Yes, certain requirements must be met. Your home must be clean, at least on the day of the inspection. You must be at least 21 years old, because babies can’t look after babies. You must have some source of gainful employment. Why would you think fostering an alien baby is any different? The rulesought to be even more stringent, really. It is good manners to host visitors as you would family, or perhaps even better.
If you wanted to know what interested the American artistic and intellectual elite in the 1980s, ’90s and early aughts, you couldn’t find a better, truer hologram than the one Ingrid Sischy provided in her essays during those years. She shows us the glitz of that epoch of celebrity culture as well as the serious, thoughtful concerns of its cutting-edge painters and designers; at her best, she enters both domains through her stylish meditations on such figures as Jeff Koons, Robert Mapplethorpe and John Galliano. Sischy’s genius was that she took philosophy lightly and fashion seriously. By the time she died of cancer in 2015, at the age of 63, she had had a dazzling career as the editor of Artforum and Interview and as a contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.
“If this novel … had been published before 2016,” Oates tweeted in January, it “would seem like dystopian future/sci-fi.” But the world she imagines is rigorously believable, its every twist underlined and circled. Oates evokes a future made from the ingredients of the present: televisions and internet access, cellphones and broken government. She doesn’t try to stretch the limits of what we know, or what we might become. That’s a task for an Atwood, perhaps.