300 Arguments

"Sarah Manguso is a contemporary American author, and I think she is the 21st-century La Rochefoucauld! We are living in a golden age of aphorists: we also have Yahia Lababidi’s Where Epics Fail ( 2018), Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors (2016), S.D. Chrostowska’s Matches: A Light Book (2015); Valeria Luiselli’s Sidewalks (2010), Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009), Don Paterson’s Best Thought, Worst Thought (2008), and James Richardson’s Vectors (2001). I must admit that all of the aphorists in my book and all of the big aphorists in the traditional history of philosophy have all been men. There were lots of women in the rarified coterie of the French salon—Marquise de Rambouillet, Marquise de Sablière, and Marquise de Sablé—they all wrote aphorisms alongside La Rochefoucauld. Brilliant though they are, the women aphorists of Paris and Versailles were out-sparkled by the men. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Here’s a really good one from Manguso that I think will resonate with teachers everywhere: “When a student surpasses my expectations, I feel proud and betrayed.” Here’s another one: “I never joined Facebook because I want to preserve my old longing and also yours.” Exactly. I think she is an astute and profound observer of our digital lives today, and how much of our lives are mediated in electronic forms. I think Manguso is able to capture many of our anxieties of the internet age just through this little aphorism. The power of the aphorism exists in its singularity. And yet, aphorisms always have this herd function. They have lots of friends and socialize quite a bit. They live, after all, in anthologies. And the great aphorist never wrote just one aphorism, but always a proliferation. Nietzsche can’t stop himself; Wittgenstein can’t stop himself. The same with Pascal. So that’s the great paradox of aphorisms: they strive towards singularity but always seem to lapse into multitude. There’s The Oxford Book of Aphorisms edited by John Gross. James Geary has two collections which also contain his own commentary: Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists and The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism . My suggestion is for people just to pick up a book like Nietzsche’s Gay Science and start reading. Lucky for me, right? I really don’t know why this is so, because there are tons of theories of the novel, poetry, or drama. I can tell you how I came to write about aphorisms, though. As I’ve mentioned, my first book was on the poets of ruins in Renaissance literature. So I was interested in architectural ruins. There, I got to think about material fragments and I got to think about architectonic forms. From material fragments, that led me to textual fragments, which led me to aphorisms. “The power of the aphorism exists in its singularity” Two other practical reasons why I came to write about aphorisms are that, first, being in Singapore, I’m far away from major libraries of the West. We lack basic scholarly critical editions and reference works in the humanities. But aphorisms are portable. You can get hold of them on Amazon, and they don’t require a huge apparatus of scholarship. And secondly, because there aren’t a lot of other books about aphorisms, I didn’t have to do that much research before starting to write my own book. Sometimes, when you’re in the periphery of knowledge production, it gives you new horizons, new insights and new opportunities to think about something that is very old yet very pervasive."