Defining Life

on aphorism and other short-cuts

Language aims at setting limits on life. To define life is the purpose of language. All language, therefore, aspires to the condition of aphorism.

Ridiculous.

But what are we trying to do when we put something into words? What does putting whatever it is into a sentence do for us?

“The best is yet to come.”

That makes me feel better, think less, mean more.

On the other hand, is the best yet to come?

Does everything happen for a reason?

Does everything happen for a reason?

To make a short story long . . .

Short story long . . .

Short long . . .

You’ve already revised this six-word to three-word to two-word demonstration of the Law of Abbreviation, or the Law of Least Effort (Zipf), so that it reads:

To make a long story short . . .

Long story short . . .

Long short . . .

How much story do we need? Why do we make a long story short? Why do we make a short story long?

To what extent does any aphorism—any definition—sum up, abbreviate, or even imply a story?

I like aphorisms, epigrams, proverbs, maxims, apothegms. Such wise sayings ask that “all partitions of knowledges be accepted rather for lines and veins, than for sections and separations,” as Francis Bacon wrote—making “knowledge” knowledges, as we now make intelligences, musics, logics, rhetorics, breads, and soaps. And then, having made that big ask, they section and separate with a vengeance.

Aphorisms are rhymes and refrains, choruses, returns, points and turning-points. They stop gaps and make gaps. They open, advance, and close arguments. They step on the gas and slam on the brakes. They’re hubcaps that show off fine wheels.

Aphorisms front for and represent such massive things as love, war, death, morality, vanity—life itself. Such massive things, so hard to put into words, don’t like being cut off, and so such sentences, such rulings, as do try to stop them in their tracks, invite “perpetual amendment and addition,” as Emerson said of Bacon’s essays. But the best aphorisms prove hard to amend and add to.

“Just because you have something don’t mean you have something.”

—Billy, 2026

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

—Lord Acton, 1887

Bacon told King James in 1625 that of all his writings, his Essays were the only ones that had “most come home to men’s business and bosoms.” Then in their third edition (because, Bacon told a friend in 1609, “I ever alter when I add”), the essays were mostly aphorisms, short-cuts, after-dinner after-thoughts of a man who, like Thomas More before him and George Herbert at the same time, had “forty businesses in hand.”¹ The essays gathered scattered occasions, dispersed them, and moved on.

But life is only occasionally scattered. It’s almost never true that we never know what to expect. We almost always know, more or less, what to expect.

Would it hurt to say that an aphorism is a densely crowded gathering place that doesn’t look very busy? “No woman is an island.” “No man is a horn section.”

Aphorisms assume authority, or institute it, or incite it, equally probably with resistance to it. They’re stump speeches in search of recorders, colds or fevers gotten out of the head.

Aphorism isn’t for the reader. The reader can go fuck themselves—and what reader won’t keep reading after being told to do that? Aphorism doesn’t cop an attitude. Aphorism is a cop. Read my badge, the aphorist says, and weep.

Aphorism scatters—smears—life and death. Aphorism hates what Bacon called “the show of total,” but is itself such a show. Anyone can be, and everyone more than once in their life is, an aphorist. The aphorist is a breaker of words, as Achilles was a breaker of horses. The aphorist can turn words on a dime and stop them on a dime.

The aphorist is a manager of chaos. But “I feel like as if” may be the suppressed opener to every legendary and every unknown aphorism, as “in bed” is the supplemental closer to every fortune cookie legend.

1. George Herbert had “forty businesses” in his hands in January, 1619. Not “a hundred,” not “a thousand.” Not “ten.” Not “many,” but “forty.” Robert Frost, in 1914, will say “forty-eleven” for Herbert’s “forty.”