Found this in P.U.'s mailbox, evidently downloaded a couple of years ago. Hope you enjoy these as much as I did. gmfe
Vectors 2.0: More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays
1. Already tomorrow and too late, still yesterday and too soon.
2. It was not sin that brought death, but the reverse. When God first appeared in Eden, we started, suddenly ashamed we had a secret no immortal could understand.
3. Mountains occur together.
4. I have no time, he snapped, as if he'd just asked himself for alms, and refused.
5. Birds of prey don't sing.
6. Happiness, like water, is always available, but so often it seems we'd prefer a different drink.
7. Travel reminds us we are always traveling.
8. Better to repeat the obvious than fear it.
9. Most of what looks like change is cliché perfecting itself.
10. How often feelings are circular. How embarrassing to appear embarrassed. How annoying to be annoyed.
11. I was 25, till I was 40, 40 till I was 50. But now my age is like the speedometer. If I don't pay attention it drifts, 60, 70, 80....
12. My illness cures me. By telling me at last what's wrong.
13. What a fool! I say of myself, with a vehemence and embarrassment that must mean I'd been thinking I wasn't.
14. The wrong blessing is no blessing.
15. They break down my body, my peace, alas, my principles: devils are personal, like genes. They are the one-room fire on the fourteenth floor that crowds watch, glad it's someone else. For large-scale catastrophe, you need a god: something everyone believes in.
16. In saying my work fails I flatter myself that I have imagined what it should have been.
17. Fire loves best what it cannot burn.
18. Do not be too quick to pull out your flaws. They endure dry seasons, thrive uncared for. They have deeper roots than you. They hold the slope in place.
19. The despair of the blank page: it is so full.
20. Ax built the house but sleeps in the shed.
21. The chorus fills what the soloist has emptied.
22. There is no misstep till you put your foot down.
23. It's not that no one notices his scheme, it's just that it would be more tedious to expose him than to go along. Which is more annoying: that he doesn't know this, or that he probably does?
24. I'm difficult to annoy, but the few who get the knack never seem to lose it.
25. His lie doesn't bother me as much as the truth he thinks he knows.
26. How sure we are that everyone's watching. How sure we are that no one sees.
27. We trust the embarrassed one. He believes the world is thinking of him more than it is. But at least he believes in the world.
28. Useful to see how you could love every person, every job, for an hour. Necessary to realize how short an hour is.
29. It's not a fact or feeling or even a flaw that's embarrassing but who I was pretending to be.
30. What scares me in suffering is the mechanical. The repetition compelled and wobbly, like a wheel with something wrong with it. The voice with something in it like bad brakes.
31. The Unembarrassable are like gods. We envy them; we hate them; they don't exist.
32. Know thyself. Ok, so?
33. Inside the head, art's not democratic. I wait a long time to be a writer good enough even for myself.
34. Institutions are the opposite of God: their periphery is everywhere, their center nowhere.
35. We can "have" ideas or feelings or experiences, but we cannot really tell which are ours, and they can be given away freely. But some things I need permission to tell. Our real privacy belongs to others.
36. Why do I complain, since I'd brush off solace? Some pains I just have to say, as if to confess faults before someone accused me of them.
37. Injustice: the god whose name we whisper when no other has remembered us.
38. First I have to learn to love myself, always makes me writhe. I'm the last person I want to hear I love you from, the last I want to say it to. The part of myself I like is the part that works, like a good tool. The part of myself I love is the part that loves you.
39. He Thought Positively till he became a euphemism for himself.
40. Some busy themselves to distract their passion, others because they cannot find it.
41. Why should they love your work? Do you?
42. When we suffer, we think we owe nothing. We imagine we suffer so we can imagine we owe nothing.
43. When all agree, so does the Devil.
44. Everything's text used to be scary: Look, I believe in less than you. Now it's just another comforting piety. You could be downloaded, Xeroxed, it says, you're immortal. And even better, No one's lived more than you, no one's wiser. Like the old song says, You are everything / And everything is you. A Great Book reading itself in the mirror.
45. Each year gets late earlier.
46. Wisdom was . . . knowing how to hold your head in the wind. But hold it that way always and you're a sermon, an ad, an idiot.
47. Light, beasts of the field, the firmament: easy. But not till the seventh day did God figure out Rest.
48. Billions of years, the dust hasn't settled. Water's still seeking its own level.
49. A car or stone becomes the exact temperature of the winter, but a man gets colder and colder.
James RichardsonThe Yale ReviewVolume 92, Number 2April 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Yale University All rights reserved. Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
