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The title comes from the book by Schopenhauer, who wrote in the Preface: "These additional writings, that are subsidiary to my more ... systematic works, consist partly of a few essays on a wide variety of special topics and partly of isolated ideas on an even greater range of subjects."
Aphorisms
Bold print and faint print: mediocrities and celebrities
The need for evaluation
Aphorisms (for a very short introduction to the Aphorism form, click here)...
Nature, and the universe
The arts
Life and death
Happiness and suffering
Honesty, ideology, religion
Never play music loud in the countryside, even if the music is intensely beautiful and the countryside very dull.
A pool need not remind us of the sea.
A mountain so awesome that it forces us to look down rather than up.
More and more, being amongst natural beauty is like attending a concert interrupted by coughing and talking from beginning to end.
I emerge from a winter without much snow as unrefreshed as from a night without much sleep. (From a poem.)
It is one of the signs of the triumph over nature that there are so many facetious people.
It's impossible to swim in water in which it's impossible to drown.
Technology is as indifferent, ambiguous and wasteful as nature.
It is not so much that nature is so cruel as that part of nature is so sensitive.
Nature is an assemblage of dissimilar components, which often cohere beautifully.
Perspectives: from the parochial to the regional to the national to the international, which is parochial if it takes no account of nature.
The relationship between the mind and the universe is far from being that of an infinitesimal against the infinite.
Contrasts so extreme it takes a universe to contain them.
Writers have not much incentive to be strong, since they can make so much of their weakness.
Poeticules use a rule.
Poets use a graticule.
To the born writer, the blank sheet of paper (or computer screen) is as inviting as Walt Whitman's open road. But often, the road turns out to be blocked.
A writer must usually be far more patient than a gardener.
As well as explaining reality and reflecting reality, art extends it, so that reality becomes more mysterious and problematic than ever.
Depth and insight, like talents and abilities, may go to the less deserving.
Many books come complete with their own antidote, many are innocuous, some are addictive, a few are fatal.
Pain, waste, the humdrum, ignorance, violence and chance - the world throws up all sorts of objections to shallow and inadequate thought and art.
The world is so constructed as to discredit superficial thought and art.
There isn't much difference between the most austere music and the most sensuous poetry.
If you're tiring of very great music, listen to some very bad music.
Simple curiosity has probably never been the motive for a suicide.
Dying must be terrible - like becoming blind, deaf, dumb and totally paralyzed, and losing your mind, all at once.
The richness of a life rich in disappointments. (From a poem.)
We feel that the death of an old person is much less tragic than that of a young one, even though it may be the older person and not the younger one who has achieved so little, experienced so little.
The central facts of life are revealed by experiences which are marginal and of rare intensity.
The years accumulate, and are compressed.
As well as the obvious limits at its beginning and end, each life has limits at the sides.
Pain that seems to be in the body is often a sign that there's something wrong with the body. Pain in the mind is often a sign that there's something right with the mind.
The body knows the difference between happiness and unhappiness but not the difference between spirituality and deadness.
Conventional, and courageous, people like others to suffer sensibly and not to give way to despair or rage - in other words, not to suffer as intensely as they might, or perhaps to extract as much benefit from the experience as they might. A kind of courage is needed for self-pity.
We're often told that we can't find happiness by trying to find it, yet we're often given advice as to how to dispel unhappiness.
The primitive, understandable fear of becoming lost, of leaving behind roads and paths, helps to explain the refusal to follow an argument wherever it leads, the reassurance of religions and ideologies.
For Christians, the Christian revelation has taken away from life the mystery which for the non-Christian remains. For skeptics, far more than for Christians, this is a mysterious and magical world.
This world is inexhaustible and unfathomable. We need speculate about no other. (From a poem.)
Religious people who are regarded as deep are often simply out of their depth.
The horrific imperfections of the world foster courage and ingenuity. Why not skepticism?
Self-evident untruths and half-truths will always be popular.
Honest people may well reinterpret their lives at intervals as drastically as totalitarian regimes reinterpret their own history
"I detest your ideology and the ideologies you detest."
People are often cowardly where little courage is needed and heroic when the highest courage is called for.
'The later can be better than the earlier.' There's more consolation in this than in all the religions of the world. It may even console us for the existence of those religions.
From the Introduction to the Oxford Book of Aphorisms, by John Gross (a superb collection):
"...although the two words ['maxim' and 'aphorism'] certainly overlap, they are far from interchangeable...Aphorisms tend to be distinctly more subversive; indeed, it is often a maxim that they set out to subvert. And they are less cut and dried, more speculative and glancing...[the aphorism] is a form of literature, and often a highly idiosyncratic or self-conscious form at that. It bears the stamp and style of the mind which created it; its message is universal but scarcely impersonal...There are times when the very form of the aphorism seems to lend itself to a disenchanted view of human nature. Anxious to distance himself from platitude, the aphorist is drawn towards the unsettling paradox...there are of course as many different kinds of aphorism as aphorist...classic aphorisms and romantic aphorisms, aphorisms which deflate and aphorisms (rather fewer) which console."
and other writing...
Bold print is well established, but I see the need to use faint print or very faint print for some purposes - when there's no alternative but to write about the diseased and boring world of celebrities, soaps, Big Brother, game show presenters, so many other presenters and other TV dross (I don't own a TV and I've never owned a TV, but it's difficult to escape them completely), supermodels - just call them 'models,' These and others are given so much publicity that the least I can do is give them none at all, and if on the rarest of rare occasions I do mention them, as here, to use faint print or very faint print, reserving normal print for people who deserve it and for real achievements. To revert to bold print for a moment: 'Mediocrities are very interested in celebrities.'
In matters of human achievement, every system of classification should be secondary to one based on the difference between great and mediocre.
Why do so many academics avoid evaluation? And not only in departments of English literature. If they drink wine, they're able to detect, very likely, the difference in complexity and subtlety between good and bad wine (although of course a good person may drink bad wine and a bad person may drink good wine). If they travel, they're aware, I would think, of the difference between dramatic and interesting scenery and bland or degraded places. They must make the necessary distinctions between the personal qualities of the people they meet, to have some opinions, if they're married, about the person they're married to. Why, then, avoid evaluation in literature? Or, just as bad, evaluate by using criteria which have nothing to do with evaluation: deciding whether a writer or a work is good by using the criteria of feminist or non-feminist or anti-feminist, colonial or anti-colonial or pre-colonial or post-colonial, offering opportunities for interpretation by means of Derrida's works or not. In literature there's absolutely no mechanical way of arriving at an estimate of worth.
From James Wood, 'The Slightest Sardine,' a review in the London Review of Books of 'The Oxford Literary History, Vol. XII: 1960-2000: The Last of England? by Randall Stevenson, published by Oxford University Press.
"There is no greater mark of the gap that separates writers and English departments than the question of value. The very thing that most matters to writers, the first question they ask of a work - is it any good? - is often largely irrelevant to university teachers. Writers are intensely interested in what might be called aesthetic success: they have to be, because in order to create something successful one must learn about other people's successful creations. To the academy, much of this value-chat looks like, and can indeed be, mere impressionism. Again, theory is not the only culprit. A good deal of postmodern thought is suspicious of the artwork's claim to coherence, and so is indifferent or hostile to the discussion of its formal success. But conventional, non-theoretical criticism often acts as if questions of value are irrelevant, or canonically settled. To spend one's time explaining how a text works is not necessarily ever to talk about how well it works, though it might seem that the latter is implicit in the former. Who bothers, while teaching The Portrait of a Lady for the nth time, to explain to a class that it is a beautiful book? But it would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that, for most writers, greedy to learn and emulate, this is the only important question.
"Randall Stevenson's volume in the Oxford English Literary History, which provides an account of 1960 to 2000, prompts these thoughts, because his book has no interest in aesthetic intention and no interest in aesthetic success. It is a purely academic account of hundreds of literary forms created almost entirely by non-academics. In more than six hundred pages, it is hard to detect the author, who teaches at Edinburgh University, making a single evaluative judgment. In a moment of daring, he calls A House for Mr Biswas 'much-admired', but since he also reserves that epithet for 'The Whitsun Weddings', which he appears not to like, one is left in the dark. This evaluative reticence is not timidity, however. He does have likes and dislikes, and they emerge steadily. He likes poetry and fiction that draw attention to their own procedures: 'self-reflexive, postmodern' forms are what excite him, and the authors of these seem politically 'progressive' to him. This is why he likes J.H. Prynne's verse, but not Larkin's, and why he writes enthusiastically about Rushdie but treats A Dance to the Music of Time as if it were just a handbook of toff sociology.
'He has opinions about artworks; but they are never aesthetic ones. He rarely treats poems and novels as if they have any aesthetic autonomy, as if they might be charged formal spaces within which a high degree of intentionality and detail superbly exist. Instead, he is an epigraphist, content to read works for their historical content. Insofar as form and language detain him, they detain him as questions of ideology. It may be for this reason that he seems to prefer drama to poetry and fiction, and that he praises 'the particularly rapid progress of English drama' in this period. (Drama, being more openly political than either fiction or poetry, is more progressive.) Just as he stints discussion of aesthetics, so he repeatedly writes as if authorial intention were merely instrumental, a matter of having one's say about certain issues.'
There's an urgent need to outgrow and leave behind a purely descriptive linguistics (and a purely descriptive psychology.) To confine attention to what's actually spoken or written can give the linguist a restricted and debased field of study, one in which just a few words are dominant: 'great,' (not in the sense that 'Churchill was a great leader' and Shakespeare' a great writer'), 'brilliant,' 'fantastic' and 'fabulous.' The need for evaluative linguistics and evaluative psychology.
