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lucasmiller's review against another edition
3.0
My bookshelf has acquired a small but growing collection of books of aphorisms over the past year or so. It is difficult to track where this fascination first started. The purchase of the Oxford book of aphorism, the Viking book of aphorism selected in part by W. H. Auden. The purchase of a collection of Guy Davenport writings that include logia of two ancient Greek philosophers and Jesus of Nazareth. I'm not sure, but in all honesty, this slim volume, a scant 90 pages with little more than three sentences per page was picked up not without the goal of padding my 2017 reading challenge just a bit.
"Really being able to follow your whims is a talent requiring a long and secret gestation."
Marbles is a collection of aphorism written for the purpose of being placed into a collection of aphorisms. So often books of aphorisms are really quotations stripped of context and strategically placed in an order to heighten the affect of the polished pearls of wisdom adding up to something. This skill of recontextualizing familiar and less familiar words into some sort of cohesive whole is in itself a literary talent that I find really amazing and gratifying. Also, one that doesn't receive enough credit. A big to do might be made of curation being the truest form of creativity in the 21st century, but the practice hasn't sprung up along with the internet or anything. As far as I can tell anyway.
"Not answering, answering more slowly, answering with less. today half the are of correspondence is in that."
Reading these aphorisms in two short sittings is like reading the notes from a much longer work of memoir or perhaps a manifesto. Not quite like overhearing snatches of conversation, because this words were intended to be heard, judged in their own small clusters and as a whole. Social interaction and writing predominate as themes in these aphorisms and that seems fitting for a writer thinking about writing as a form of conversation.
There is something casually philosophical about writing in this way. While it might seem slight or cute or old fashioned, it can also be immensely satisfying to watch the attempt to uncover something real about human experience, however insignificant, and attempt to capture it in a few words.
"Really being able to follow your whims is a talent requiring a long and secret gestation."
Marbles is a collection of aphorism written for the purpose of being placed into a collection of aphorisms. So often books of aphorisms are really quotations stripped of context and strategically placed in an order to heighten the affect of the polished pearls of wisdom adding up to something. This skill of recontextualizing familiar and less familiar words into some sort of cohesive whole is in itself a literary talent that I find really amazing and gratifying. Also, one that doesn't receive enough credit. A big to do might be made of curation being the truest form of creativity in the 21st century, but the practice hasn't sprung up along with the internet or anything. As far as I can tell anyway.
"Not answering, answering more slowly, answering with less. today half the are of correspondence is in that."
Reading these aphorisms in two short sittings is like reading the notes from a much longer work of memoir or perhaps a manifesto. Not quite like overhearing snatches of conversation, because this words were intended to be heard, judged in their own small clusters and as a whole. Social interaction and writing predominate as themes in these aphorisms and that seems fitting for a writer thinking about writing as a form of conversation.
There is something casually philosophical about writing in this way. While it might seem slight or cute or old fashioned, it can also be immensely satisfying to watch the attempt to uncover something real about human experience, however insignificant, and attempt to capture it in a few words.
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