How to be Awake

June 17

2011-06-17T03:53:00.000-07:00

The deepest pessimism is silent. Many a jeremiad against humanity is a vote of confidence in its prospects, as it pressuposes future readers to concur with its sentiments.

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There may be mercy killings but there can be no mercy births.

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'You make your own fate,' say people born with the good fortune of never having had to prove it.

May 4

2011-05-04T06:29:00.000-07:00

Life is our only frame of reference. Death brings an end to everything, including itself.

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Words on the page sleep, dreamless as hills - until eye read either, line or land.

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Spring drought, and the heaths and woods where I grew up are burning. There is nothing in prospect but more of this: the familiar warping before our eyes. In the hard world coming, we will have to relearn many lost arts - including the art of losing.

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The pity of the world lies not in its horror but in the evolution of a mind capable of imagining that things might be otherwise.

February 27

2011-02-27T10:36:00.000-08:00

We prefer to suffer than to recover from those ills that defines us.

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Tragedy is humiliation accepted, comedy humiliation resisted. This is why, at the ends of their careers, most politicians aspiring to the former condition achieve only the latter.

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The mind that reads is too full of itself to mind what is written. So we sit, inattentive to our inattention, regarding ourselves pretending to understand.

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How strange to be afraid of the dark. Even with the lights on, we have to go to sleep in our heads.

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The gall, the presumption of the builder's shout: 'Cheer up mate, it might never happen.' For all he knows, it already has.

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Love is the opposite of hate but friendship is its antidote.

November 27

2010-11-27T10:27:00.000-08:00

The worst have their passionate intensity and the struggle is not between faith and unbelief but between moderation and extremism.

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Our ultimate regret - that everything passes - may also prove our last consolation.

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We are all dying. The trick is to do it as slowly as possible.

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Midterms in America - and voters, furious at their physician's ineffective treatment, raid the medicine cabinet for the bottle that poisoned them.

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There is vanity in self-reproach: why should you be immune to human failure?

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Planning ahead, the best we can do is to choose with care our future regrets.

October 15

2010-10-15T12:49:00.000-07:00

Lest they mistake the plain for the simple, campaigners for plain English should consider the words: ‘Is not’.

What if arcadia is a place, not of refuge, but of protest?

The masochist can come to love most pains except himself.

Arrian recounts that Alexander the Great endured the rebuke of an Indian philosopher. “You roam presumptuously over the world, giving no rest to yourself or others. Yet soon you will die, and possess no more of the earth than suffices for your burial.” Alexander praised his critic, accepted the reproof of a conquered people – then resumed his conquests. There is no truth that can be spoken to power that power cannot cheerfully ignore.

Concision is a virtue only in part. The aphorism, in its brevity, also shrugs off the burden of proof.

Just read ‘sales assistant’ as ‘slaves assistant’ –– though which of us is meant I can’t be certain.

Happiness is a by-product. Make it your goal and you will always shoot wide.

Those who deny the existence of ghosts must forget their dreams the moment they waken.

Familiarity can also breed comfort. Finding myself alone for the evening, I curl up with a cup of tea in front of The Shining.

September 15

2010-09-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

No matter how often we smile at our reflections, we will never win over the mirror.

We look to power to remedy error; but error is power’s currency of action. All it can do is manufacture new errors under which to conceal the old.

Reality is merely the impossibility in which the world has chosen to invest.

From rice to rye, wheat to corn, and all meats reared on the same, we are in essence herbivores. Let us pursue our holocausts of grass: patiently, implacably, it will grow over us.

Innocence cannot mean immunity. The sins of the father will cease to be inherited when the same is true of the sorrows.

An aphorism is a remark that has won itself some elbow room.

June 7

2010-06-07T08:30:00.000-07:00

Powerless against those that tread on us, we stamp our feet on those below. What trickles down of wealth is not money but grievance.

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How I dread unpleasantness: I get toothache at the very thought of the bullet I must bite.

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Views can be fences. Knowing what we think, we may fail to think through what we know.

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Life, that has no reason for being, cannot get enough of itself, and it is human pride that refuses to call this delight.

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Unlike writers, a field does not grow anxious while it lies fallow.

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'So,' says my friend, 'I've been reading your aphorisms.' I do not ask 'And?' and he makes no further comment. No further comment is needed.

June 5

2010-06-05T08:51:00.000-07:00

Cornucopians dream perpetual abundance; deep ecologists predict apocalypse. Both are mistaken. There will be no end, only painful presents.

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It is easy to be cocksure in expecting the worst. Nobody defines themselves as cautiously pessimistic.

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In private, the prude longs to shed a letter.

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No wonder so many writers drink: day after day at the page, decanting one book into another...

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Many that boast about their love of liberty overstate their commitment. I'm all for free speech but I suspect the only thing that I would defend to the death is my life.

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Where we cannot bring change, let us at least irk.

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Perhaps we weep because our weeping alters nothing.

May 18

2010-05-18T02:30:00.000-07:00

If a virus could think as we do, it too would imagine itself to be exceptional.

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When, in old age, her last lover died, she declared herself a virgin: untouched by a living hand.

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If a man treads on your toe, tread on his, but first remove your foot from under it.

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Good prose takes the long way round in pursuit of a shortcut to the reader.

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Perhaps only negative perfection is possible. The most luminous success cannot boast the integrity of complete failure.

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Behind every aphoristic assertion there should be the watermark of a question.

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Banter: what oft was thought but ne'er deemed worth expressing.

May 4

2010-05-04T07:09:00.000-07:00

Eventually, given its mania for conspiracy theories, the radical right will accuse the polluting industries of a scam to keep environmentalists in work.

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Thanks to modern communications, we can watch a catastrophe unfold, in real time, on the far side of the world. Technology make us hobbled gods, all seeing yet powerless to intervene.

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Virtue belongs to those who resist a talent. You cannot admire the honesty of a lousy liar.

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Truth is the goal but plausibility is the destination.

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There is privilege inherent in complaint; the powerless know that no one is listening.

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Some things must be seen through to be seen.

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Know that you're a fool; but don't treat yourself like one.

April 22

2010-04-22T01:58:00.000-07:00

He can’t love; she can’t empathise. There can be no legislating for hidden disabilities.

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According to Swift, Man is rationis capax: a species capable of reason. We are also capable of running 100 metres in under ten seconds; but it’s not a talent given to many.

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With European flights grounded, gone is the impulse to leap on a plane to escape the noise of aircraft.

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Sexual propriety is the want of opportunity promoted to a virtue.

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Why do political journalists associate smiling with a ‘human face’? A scowl, a grimace, a sneer are no less representative of the species.

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Some couples separate to escape the loneliness of being together.

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The Left patronises in word, the Right in deed. This may be why so many working-class Americans vote Republican. We prefer to be exploited for our ignorance than informed of it.

April 12

2010-04-12T04:23:00.000-07:00

If the conceit is true, that the most vocal homophobes are shouting down their hidden natures, what does it say about me that I so readily declare other people morons?

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With the e-book, reading is reduced to a single artefact through which the text passes like a spirit through a medium. Thus the book loses its corporeal existence and literature enters the age of ghosts.

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I read that Michel Leiris, in a book called Manhood, compared writing to bullfighting, for the courage required of the participants. This is priceless. The only thing in common between the torero and the writer is the word ‘bull’.

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Don’t be too hard on yourself. There’s a whole universe for that.

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I have a head for books and factoids, with too little space left over for life. E, on the other hand, remembers everything. She contemplates in retrospect a furrowed field, while I look back upon trees in fog.

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The aphorist must peep through cracks. To see things whole would shame us into silence.

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Do politicians speak like politicians at home? “My policy of fidelity towards you, my darling, is aspirational rather than a target...”

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If at first you don’t succeed, get a man in.

March 28

2010-03-28T12:37:00.000-07:00

I ended it, and felt the unassuageable contrition of the gardener who finds two writhing halves of the one worm.

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Oh the irony! We achieve mass literacy and Rupert Murdoch buys all the newspapers.

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If we could reconcile ourselves, truly, to the fact that no one’s watching, what fun we might get up to.

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Even as we read we forget, and what remains to us is not essence but residuum.

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The randomness of suffering being intolerable, humanity invented malediction.

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As we grow older we slow down because we can glimpse our destination.

March 5

2010-03-05T07:52:00.000-08:00

If a truth falls on deaf ears, does it make a sound?

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With the fall of the press and the rise of the blog, the age of the hack is passing into history. Now, pace Johnson: No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for pleasure.

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The seas are acidifying faster than at any time in 55 million years. We read this and move on. For all our computers, we cannot compute.

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If the internet had existed in Weimar Germany, the Nazis might never have taken power, as their thugs would have been too busy beating up their opponents online.

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The soil of thought is temperament.

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The failure of extraterrestrial intelligence to contact us may well be proof of its existence.

March 2

2010-03-02T04:11:00.000-08:00

An insensitive bore is not alone in his vanity. To fear the ill-opinion of others is grossly to overestimate the space we take up in their imaginations.

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We can only hope by way of contrast that once in a while good comes from our acting with the worst intentions.

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A nag is someone who pursues us with the truth.

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After a time that might have been an afternoon and might have been a century, Lucifer ordered his minions to take down the sign. ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’ was an instruction that deprived Hell of its most effective torture.

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To root out clichés is to prosecute ourselves.

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The sometime pleasure of a second glance. What I took, with an inner grumble, for litter becomes a hillside of snowdrops.

February 19

2010-02-19T13:59:00.000-08:00

The fox and the hedgehog have their domains; but what beast represents the rest of us, who know nothing save our opinions?

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The poetic response to Schrödinger’s thought experiment is to ask: what colour is the cat?

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M’s high standards, his reticence to publish all save the best, the most durable of his writing, makes me feel like a flasher who braves the streets offering a magnifying glass to his victims.

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Sometimes a typo gets to the heart of things. Just found on a green issues blog: “Grab your coast, apocalypse watchers”.

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We declare the person fascinating who listens to us longest.

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Testosterone can make a competition out of anything. Somewhere, probably, there’s a birdwatching club whose first rule is that it mustn’t be spoken of.

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Love has one language but many dialects.

February 10

2010-02-10T04:32:00.000-08:00

An early death is a truncated story. Thirteen years after she took her own life, I find myself wanting to catch up with S. on Facebook.

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When, in the insufficiently distant future, our snouts are plunged into SimWorld and iLove and VR sex parlours, some intrepid beard will stumble with eyes aflame upon this astounding technology: the paper codex.

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In the lost forest of Caledon, I looked up to watch a raven perform its victory spin. Such gratuitous virtuosity! It was raven celebrating raven –– as life asserts its meaning in being.

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Some birds beat the air as if it were a foe meaning to drag them down. Others seem only to flap their wings in order to keep us from getting suspicious.

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What’s blindingly obvious cannot be looked at.

February 2

2010-02-02T13:08:00.000-08:00

Politics may require a fudge but the biosphere doesn’t do compromise. Even if you leap three-quarters of the way, you still end up in the ditch.

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When success eludes us, we learn to take comfort from the consistency of our failures.

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Our last illusions about the solidity of the world vanish when we become parents and realise that the ground we stand upon is ourselves.

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Aliens came to Earth and sought at once a meeting with its most successful species. They are still waiting for the cockroaches to speak.

January 31

2010-01-31T13:12:00.000-08:00

The spirit moves with action yet action moves from the spirit. Our task is to start.

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One day, the messengers of the world will rise up and shoot first.

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With luck, we may be inoculated by experience. The only immunity against stupidity is to have contracted it at least once.

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Reform demands feeling but sentimentality is reactionary. Dickens’s first readers could congratulate themselves on their tender feelings for Smike even as they stepped over the child prostitute in their doorway.

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A better word for triumph is reprieve.

January 30

2010-01-30T14:44:00.000-08:00

The most shameful iconoclasm is the kind that’s well remunerated.

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‘Fearless’ is an epithet which bigots apply to themselves. An open mind grapples constantly with dread.

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Curious, how many now living were Cleopatra in a former life and how few the slave who emptied her chamber-pot.

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The voyage of self-discovery is not without risk. What if you reach your destination and can’t stand the place?

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Distrust the man who does not apologise to the snail he’s just trodden on.

January 25

2010-01-25T12:43:00.000-08:00

Life is made of unfinishings. Temperament concludes from this either hope or despair.

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I thought I was being flippant but I found it online. The only thing missing from God the Action Figure is the prefix ‘In–’.

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Innately subversive, laughter can be turned, like a spy, against the common good. We hear this in the self-congratulation of the snigger.

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Some journalists fabricate, but most insist on paraphrasing the press release that does it for them.

January 22

2010-01-22T07:11:00.000-08:00

The tragedy of sleep is that we can’t be awake to appreciate it.

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Given the propensity of families to quarrel, an appeal to universal brotherhood is tantamount to an invocation of war.

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Thought and reason are not always aligned. One must think oneself stupid in order to avoid thinking oneself stupid.

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Whereof we cannot speak, thereof someone will make a wisecrack.

January 19

2010-01-19T03:25:00.000-08:00

The libertarian response to our present crisis is to assert its non-existence. They shake their heads until their eyes blur and proclaim this clarity of vision.

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We are all bigots when our sense of self depends upon it.

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It is no more abject to read a book because everyone else has than to avoid it for the same reason.

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The recurrent nightmare of a Papuan warrior finds him deep in enemy territory when his comrades suddenly vanish. The techno-grunt jangling with gadgets and acronyms suffers exactly the same dream. We are no different from our ancestors –– only more encumbered.

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Doubtless the play in which I must perform tonight, without having learned a single line, would in the dream of an earlier incarnation have been the rowan twig with which I confronted a sabre-toothed tiger.

January 16

2010-01-16T09:37:00.000-08:00

Why isn’t bullshit listed on the Stock Exchange?

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Truth runs uphill. The blowhards on Fox News always start with that advantage.

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If we listed Churchill’s failings in the absence of his achievements, we would remember a monster.

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He who desires, but acts not, has a shot at a halfway decent marriage.

January 15

2010-01-15T10:09:00.000-08:00

Eight times in a million years, human beings colonized Britain. Seven times these attempts failed; why should it be any different for us?

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The Earth abides, and bides its time. I like to imagine yet that our voices will be missed.

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Perhaps science fiction remains niche because of its emphasis on deep time, deep space – the dizzying perspectives of the Universe. Fiction that puts us into context is safest confined to the nerd ghetto.

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And yet we are tellurian. Every trip into the stars turns our faces towards home.

January 14

2010-01-14T03:52:00.000-08:00

For Proust, it was a madeleine. Yesterday, the smell of a particular blend of mud restored me to my childhood.

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I still look under my pillow for the spider that died there in 1983.

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Truth is complex, lies are easy. Fiction solves this problem by wearing its untruth on its sleeve –– thereby asserting kinship with its supposed opposite.

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Nothing kills reading more effectively than its elevation to a virtue.

January 13

2010-01-13T02:40:00.000-08:00

Even paradox feels glib when it makes an exhibition of itself.

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Should Paradise exist, our instincts would have to be filtered out of us by death, or else we’d ruin the place.

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Distinct from other ages, when exile still meant a place of brightness somewhere, there’ll be no green shade to retire to when the world turns to shit.

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Imbeciles who call global warming science a ‘belief’ are on to something yet. Environmentalism shares with God-hankering an inexpressible nostalgia.

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Our gaze is the tribute that beauty demands of us. The bloody tyrant.

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The truth may set you free but it’s cold outside.

January 12

2010-01-12T03:54:00.000-08:00

Concerned for the environment, she insists on taking reusable bags whenever she flies to New York to do her shopping.

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The instant S. dropped the first lobster in the pot, I knew that, except for those who love me, my own death will be of no more consequence.

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The dominant mode of the aphorism appears to be sourness: evidence of its inadequacy as a form –– if we seek in literature the sum of human experience.

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Admiring new hedgerows, young woods – the slow restoration of ‘improved’ farmland – I wonder if progress and vandalism are distinguishable only with hindsight.

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Our nostalgia for the country condemns us all to the suburbs.

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My contract with the landscapes I so value must be never to live there.