by Gerald Dworkin

Many of the quotations that appear in my e-reader Philosophy: A Commonplace Book are one-liners:

There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said. —Beckett

Better latent than never. —Morgenbesser

Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex. —Marx

But often the difference between a one-liner and a many- is arbitrary. Wilde's “I do all the talking. It saves time and prevents arguments” could have a semi-colon instead of a period and be a one-liner. Thus Shaw: One sees things as they are and asks why; another dreams things that never were, and asks why not. Or, as Nabokov put it: The difference between a therapist and the rapist is a matter of distance.

This brings us to the concept of an aphorism. Most definitions, wisely, do not use a precise measure of length or depend grammatical structure. Here are some typical definitions.

1) a pithy observation
2) a terse saying
3) a short phrase
4) a brief statement
5) a concise statement
6) a laconic expression

It was Nietzsche's aim to “to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book—what everyone else does not say in a book.” But he was also brilliant at much shorter length. “All truth is simple…is that not doubly a lie?”

Obviously this pithetic character is at best a necessary condition but not sufficient. “Today is Monday” is pithy enough but lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Again, definitions try to supply the missing ingredient in different ways– “embodying a general truth”, “makes a statement of wisdom” , “astute observation”. The first of these seems, to us now, too weak. “Objects fall when unsupported” is both pithy and a general truth. But Bacon titled one of his books on the nature of science Aphorisms Concerning the Interpretation of Nature.

For what it is worth, the word derives from aphorismos (greek) meaning definition. And indeed historically many aphorisms took the form of definitions. Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary being a prime example. ACADEMY. Originally a grove in which philosophers sought a meaning in nature; now a school in which naturals seek a meaning in philosophy. PHILOSOPHY. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

All of this is by way of introducing the reader to a particularly clever and astute practitioner of that current system of aphoristic communication knows as the TWEET. Now those inclined to resist all things contemporary may object that any message that may be as large as 140 characters cannot be an aphorism. (Joke interruption: I was asked the other day to supply a password with at least eight characters. I decided upon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.) And those truly hostile may note that the definition of Tweet given first in all dictionaries is “A weak chirping sound, as of a young or small bird.” But the tweets I am bringing to your attention are both short and clever.

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by Tasneem Zehra Husain

I'm a total pushover when it comes to stories of connection. I am delighted by accounts of barriers breaking down and disparate people uniting in purpose, of ideas coalescing and theories fusing to reveal the common threads that underlie diversity. As I look back upon the history of physics, what reaches out and grabs me are the moments of unification when strands long thought separate are suddenly braided together in a whole that is stronger and more beautiful than the sum of its parts. Sometimes we uncover hidden affinities by exploring a motif repeated in apparently unrelated contexts; at other times, we are compelled by circumstance to form alliances with those we may have neglected, to put our heads together and come up with a solution acceptable to all. The conundrum of dark matter falls solidly in the latter category.

For several decades, cosmologists and astronomers had been growing progressively distant from their particle physics colleagues. As one group craned their necks further out into uncharted space, the other crawled deeper into the recesses of the atom. The disciplines began to seem as divergent as the scales upon which they operate, but there is a surprising resonance between the minute and the colossal. Even objects of cosmic proportions are built from subatomic particles. The discovery of dark matter was a reminder that no part of the universe can be completely understood by those who turn their backs on the rest.

Discussions of dark matter (and dark energy) are often front-ended by a startling admission of ignorance: the entire gamut of matter particles we conventionally study – quarks and leptons combined – forms less than 5% of the known universe. There is about five times as much dark matter out there, we are told, while the rest of the universe is made up of dark energy. But, since neither dark matter nor dark energy can be seen, how do scientists justify this shocking claim? An analogy might help. The mechanism of human vision is such that we see objects only when they reflect light. But if you find yourself in a pitch dark room, you don't immediately conclude that just because nothing is visible, the room must be empty. You simply realize that sight is no longer a reliable guide under these circumstances, and you must lean on sounds and smells, and touch (and taste?) to probe your surroundings. For lifeforms less dependent on vision, the darkness is multi-textured and alive with variety. Consider bats, for instance. Where we rely on light hitting objects and bouncing back, bats bank on sound. They emit high frequency calls, inaudible to human ears, and use the resulting echoes to construct a sonic map of their surroundings (the further an object is, the longer it takes for the echo to come back). The moral of the story is this: as long as there is a way for you to interact with an object, you can “sense” its presence.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

I

It's impossible for me to leave a place well. I used to think that I was merely bad at logistics and planning (and I am), but I manage to conspire against myself with such sinister competence that this explanation no longer seems viable. As the time to leave approaches my consciousness starts to fragment, and I become exhausted and flee into sleep. I wait too long to do things, unable to act unless I have killed my inertia with drink or other confusion, or distracted myself sufficiently that anything I do is useless. I spend hours on minutiae, reorganizing my book collection and cataloguing my kitchen equipment; they're happy hours, once I forget why I'm doing it.

Perhaps it's that leaving is quite obviously a rehearsal for death, disrupting even the faint illusions of permanence that spatial and environmental contiguity offer us. So is everything, if we have learned to listen to the philosophers and to live well, but of course we have not learned to listen and who has the time to rehearse for death these days?

I have trouble even with leaving hotel rooms and getting off of airplanes. I'm haunted by the sense that I've left traces of my self behind. Maybe in the shape of things: do I have my keys? has my wallet finalized the escape it has been plotting all these years? Perhaps these things I've left are important and their absence will make the self who leaves unviable. Eventually I get frustrated and resentful of the unreasonable claims of that future self but by then it is too late: I am nearly that future self and the instincts of self-preservation take over.

II

With leaving comes the return of beginner's mind, that flush of seeing things fresh as you did when you first arrived, of being once again surprised at the particularity of things, troubled by their contingency and delighted by the odd way the fragments of a world fit together (Louis Macneice's delightful “drunkeness of things being various”). As everyone knows by now, the only time it is truly possible to appreciate anything is when you are faced with its transience and, by then, it is too late and the moments are inextricably entangled with the melancholy of their endings. Sometimes, though, the melancholy parts to reveal intimations of an exuberant noonday joy, as when the sun stands still and makes the world bright and shimmering for a few moments before it begins to fall towards the horizon.

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by Eric Byrd

There's a subgenre of military memoirs produced by elderly emeriti, the crew-cut close readers of postwar English departments, who in late career published personal recollections of they and the other terrified teenagers who mostly fought World War Two. Alvin Kernan (Shakespeare editor, torpedo bomber crewman) is like Paul Fussell (Johnsonian, infantry officer) and Samuel Hynes (Auden biographer, Marine aviator). Seventeen year-old Kernan joined the Navy before the war, to escape the bleakness of Depression Wyoming: Ma and Pa down on the ranch, hard winters and harder times. Kernan's mother had a representatively difficult life. She killed herself while he was at sea. Home on leave, he inspects her grave “already collapsing and pocked with gopher holes”:

The World War I generation to which she, born in 1900, belonged was the first to leave the land, and with a little education, she married a soldier, moved to town, went to Florida, lost the money from the sale of her father's farm in the land boom, had a child, divorced, and began wandering—Chicago, Memphis, a ranch in Wyoming. She remarried, became a Catholic, and put a determined face on it all, but she was part of the first generation of really rootless modern Americans, moving restlessly by car about the country, emancipated socially and intellectually to a modest degree, but lost, really, without the supporting ethos and family that had protected people in the years when the continent was being settled. Alienation was the familiar state of my generation of Depression and another world war, but the old people had few defenses against it when it appeared.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos are the favorite writers of young Seaman Kernan. He could be one of their characters. As with Hemingway's Nick Adams, death-shaded excursions in the American wilds precede and forebode initiation overseas. And Kernan must have recognized his family in Dos Passos' panorama of the wandering and the unmoored, the war-mobilized, the desperately migratory. The down but not out, bumming the freights, going to sea, following work; displaced but for all that able to dream of landing somewhere better:

Returning from out baseball game, we came alongside the ship and began to send sailors up the gangway. At that moment another landing craft came up carrying officers, including the executive officer of the Suwanee—a small, dark, mean man—who stood up in the bow, dead drunk, shouting in a loud voice to the officer-of-the-deck, “Get those fucking enlisted men out of there and get us aboard.” Protocol was that officers always take precedence in landing, and our boat shoved off immediately, circling while the officers staggered up the gangway after their afternoon drinking in the officers' club. The gap between enlisted men and officers in the American navy during WWII was medieval. Enlisted men accepted the division as a necessary part of military life, but it never occurred to us that it in any way diminished our status as freeborn citizens who, because of a run of bad luck and some unfortunate circumstances like the Depression, just happened to be down for a brief time. “When we get rich” were still words deep in everybody's psyche. But the exec's words, “those fucking enlisted men,” spoke of deep and permanent divisions. He obviously really disliked us, and his words made shockingly clear that he, and maybe the other officers he represented, had no sense that we had shared great danger and won great victories together.

Dos Passos' Three Soldiers, in a paragraph.

Beyond the charm of the Lost Generation atmosphere, the virtues of Crossing the Line are its swift pace and concision of evocation. No episode lasts longer than is necessary to make the essential impressions—usually Kernan's fear and awe (at times laced with boyish glee) before the military juggernauts whose savage collisions he is witnessing. Kernan did not set out to reconstruct the birth of his literary consciousness, or find the boy in the vitae. Quite the opposite. Seaman Kernan is a small animal in a world of threats. He thinks with his gut, senses through the soles of his feet.

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by Josh Yarden

I posted a story last month about biblical metaphor, entitled “What Fruit Grows on the Tree of Knowledge?” The class discussion I related there continues with this question from a student:

“When you said that the Tree of Knowledge is not an actual tree, didn't you just make up a story that's completely different from the one in the Book of Genesis?”

“Ok, let's get back into to the mythical garden.”

“So, you're saying it's all just a myth?”

“It's not just a myth. When I say a text is mythic, I don't mean that it is false. I mean that the power of the story is in the way it reflects experiences that happen over and over again in our lives. That's how people in different cultures over thousands of years can relate to these essentially human stories. We do know for a fact that the story has existed for millennia, and it has had a powerful and a memorable impact on our society. That makes it real, whether or not the events happened as described.

“Ok, but that doesn't explain whether or not the tree of knowledge of good and bad is an actual tree.”

“You can decide for yourself, but keep in mind that Torah does not claim to be ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.' There aren't enough details in these brief stories to suggest that any of them are full accounts of actual events, but they do contain enough symbolism to be read on three levels: the myth, the moral and the metaphor.

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by Matt McKenna

At the end of Guardians of the Galaxy, there is much rejoicing by the citizens of the noble planet of Xander after their having been saved by the film's titular ragtag bunch of lovable anti-heroes. What is interesting to note, however, is how unconcerned the individuals on Xandar are by the troubling labor dynamics made apparent in their pyrrhic victory against the evil tyrant, Ronan the Accuser. Consider that a mere five “Guardians” (three humanoids, a tree, and a raccoon) were required to protect the Milky Way, a galaxy containing three hundred billion stars and, in the Marvel canon anyway, is so utterly teeming with bipedal life forms that one can't even land a spaceship on a random abandoned husk of a planet without running into at least one English speaking vigilante/mercenary/henchman who has dedicated her/his/its life to finding one lost relic or another. For goodness sake, just imagine the sheer number of plots against freedom-loving Xandarians that would arise in such a galaxy. And yet, Marvel's Milky Way apparently only requires a handful of part-time crime fighting goofballs to prevent evil from running roughshod over the forces of its PG-13-themed justice. Though it may sound as if I'm suggesting this implausibly small cosmic police force is a plot hole in Guardians of the Galaxy, it is precisely this miniscule ratio of guardians-to-villains that constitutes the film's most salient point about the real world: In our Milky Way as in Marvel's, the good jobs of the future will be dominated by a lionized elite few.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

One of my favorite 3QD associates recently wrote a wonderful blog post, Old Man Bush: The Last Motherfucker. Reminiscing about the good ol' days, he asks the inevitable question, what happened to today's youth?

It's true, George HW Bush was old school. Despite being accepted at Yale, he postpones college to fight in the war, becoming a young aviator and then war hero… and not just that, says Akim, but the badass is still jumping out of helicopters at 90 years old today. Akim is impressed and wonders how it is that we all became so soft?

Honestly. How else do you explain seedless watermelons? Nope, we can’t be bothered to spit black watermelon seeds anymore, much less just eat the white ones. Cause we’re soft.

I mean, good luck finding regular grapefruit juice. No siree Bob, it’s gotta be ruby red on every grocery store shelf, cause the plain old yellow grapefruits are a little bitter. Can’t be expected to put up with that.

Or reading a map. Or cooking dinner from scratch. Or getting up to change the channel. Or waving a hand fan. Or walking anywhere. Nope. Middle class America is too soft for any of that. Just gimme a smart phone, a remote, some takeout, a shit ton of air conditioning, and a good parking spot.

You know things are bad when you start looking back at old HW's presidency with nostalgia, right? What is really scary, though, is I had just been thinking the exact same thing!

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by Bill Benzon, appendix by Charlie Keil

Writer’s Cypher, UMMI Living Village Community Garden, Jersey City, NJ

Adolescents seem gifted in the belief that, if only the adults would get out of the way and grow up, the world would be a much better place. In that sense I am still, at 66 going on 67 (Pearl Harbor Day of this year) an adolescent. I still believe that the world needs changing, though it’s been decades since I naively thought that letters to The New York Times were a reasonable means to that end. And I still believe that it’s the adults that need changing.

But I must also move forward in the realization that I too am an adult, and have been so for some time now.

What to do?

I painted this when I was nine or ten.

I was ten years old when the Russians put Sputnik into the heavens. I still remember the October evening when my father took me outside and pointed to a moving light in the night sky. “That’s it.”

That’s when my personal history joined world history. That’s the first event that was both personally meaningful to me–I’d been drawing sketches of spaceships for years and had even done a painting or two–and was also of world historical importance. By the time I was old enough to be an astronaut, however, I’d changed.

I’d gone to college, marched against the Vietnam War, done my conscientious objector’s alternative service in the Chaplain’s Office at Johns Hopkins, and lost all interest in becoming an astronaut. Inner space had become my territory.

I got my PhD, then a job at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was astounded when Reagan was elected and re-elected–that hadn’t been in the plan, no it hadn’t. And I was really surprised when the Soviet Union collapsed. After all, I’d grown up during the height of the Cold War, read articles about back-yard bomb shelters, and had even picked out the spot in our back yard where a shelter should go. I figured that, whatever else happened in the world, that I’d go to my grave in the shadow of the Cold War.

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by Grace Boey

Imagine this: someone secretly laces your coffee with meth, every morning, for 28 mornings. Over the first week, you become increasingly hyperactive, and start to bubble with confidence and energy. You feel great, but by day 7, your behaviour starts to get erratic, and you’re irritated with everyone else who can’t keep up. By day 21, you’re having flashes of paranoia, and freak out from time to time because your mind keeps racing, and you’re convinced everyone’s watching you move too fast.

By day 28, you haven’t slept for a week. You feel invincible, so much so that you decide to take all the drugs you’ve got to see if it will kill you. Because that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? And if it does kill you, you’ll die feeling amazing… and dying would be such an incredible thing to do. In fact, this had damn well better be fatal. Thanks to the meth and sleep deprivation, you are so confused, irrational and psychotic, that this babbling seems entirely sensible.

Was the suicide attempt ‘your own decision’, in any meaningful sense? Of course it wasn’t. It certainly wasn’t my decision, when those very events happened to me a couple of years ago. The only difference? No one had secretly laced my coffee with drugs (though they might as well have). The terrifying effects were a product of my very first full-blown bipolar manic episode. Thankfully, I survived—although the doctors who treated me assured me I could just as easily not have. I had no clue what was happening at the time; my mania had swept me away, before I even realized anything was amiss.

Despite all this, people like Christian blogger Matt Walsh would say I had committed a “terrible, monstrous atrocity” that was entirely my decision. On August 12, one day after Robin Williams appeared to have killed himself as a result of depression, Walsh published an article with the headline “Robin Williams didn’t die from a disease, he died from his choice.” In it, he claimed that “suicide does not claim anyone against their will”. Depression—and by extension of Walsh’s arguments, all mental illness—is not responsible for suicide: you are. When a huge backlash ensued, he stuck to his guns and wrote a detailed response to his critics.

When I first came across the headline of Walsh's original post, I took a deep breath, read the article, took another deep breath… and read it again. My conclusion at the end of this exercise was the exactly same as my initial response: what a load of exploitative, uninformed rubbish. Walsh's statements reflect deep misconceptions about mental illness, competent decision-making and ‘free will’, which (unfortunately) hinge on the supernatural metaphysics that accompanies Christianity. It angers me that someone like this should feel entitled to piss on the grave of Robin Williams with a headline like that. And personally, as someone who has attempted suicide under the grips of both mania and depression, I am insulted by Walsh's backward ideas.

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