Essays in Idleness

Except that we can’t do aphorisms, this might be considered an age of aphorisms, rather than an age of narratives, of histories, of theories, or of literature in any other style. It abjectly fails as any sort of scientific age, some century or so having passed since the last hint of originality in science or maths, although there have been some inductive aphoristic moments, incomprehensible to the querulous world. Part of the definition of modernity, if it is not the whole definition, is our lost ability to put anything together, and grow it. Our narratives are like the snippets on YouTube — a lot of quick gunplay and violence, then two more commercial spots. When one has skimmed through a few hundreds of these, one’s chance of retaining anything at all has evaporated.

We used to get this at a slower pace from newspapers. The invention of the “yellow press” at the end of the century before last was the announcement of an end, more terrible than Gutenberg. Soon, even our wars would cease to make sense, at least to the people who were fighting them. Yet for a few more decades, one could still subscribe to The Times of London or Figaro, or even read a “beuk.” I can still remember my papa reading, and how impossible it was to get his attention, unless one inserted oneself between his eyes and the page. But now the paperless environment has arrived.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) was in some ways the master aphorist, signalling this progression from the “age of enlightenment.” He was, of course, very entertaining. A brilliant scientific mind, and a hunchback pioneer of experimental physics, nothing he wrote or calculated came to much, except his aphorisms, and his anglophilic Commentaries on the engravings of Hogarth. None of his satires could be formally proved. Direct apprehensions were what was left to him and his readers.

Somewhere he comments on the organization of the universe. “It is certainly much easier to explain than that of a plant.”

And, “there is so much goodness and ingenuity in a drop of rain that you couldn’t buy it in an apothecary’s under half a sovereign.”