Aphorisms via Michael Dirda
Posted on December 28, 2007
Filed Under Aphorisms | 3 Comments
Michael Dirda has to have to the best job in the world: He reads books, and writes about them, for a living. He is a longtime columnist for the Washington Post Book World, and in 1993 won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. For the past 40 years or so, Dirda has kept a “commonplace notebook, the volume into which I have copied out favorite passages from my reading … In it are poems, clever sayings, lines from Shakespeare and the Bible and many, many sentences and paragraphs from half-forgotten works of fiction and nonfiction. At least a third of the entries might be loosely categorized as aphorisms.” In his eclectic and engaging memoir Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life, Dirda shares some favorite sayings from his commonplace archive. Book by Book is a paean to the act of reading as well as a meditation on the practical uses of literature in daily life. A selection from Dirda’s “life lines”:
A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. —Joseph Conrad
Where is your Self to be found? Always in the deepest enchantment you have experienced. —Hugo von Hofmannsthal
In life, I have learned, there is always worse to come. —Julian Maclaren-Ross
Who speaks of victory? To endure is everything. —Rainer Maria Rilke
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god. —Jorge Luis Borges
Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man. —Leon Trotsky
Dirda even occasionally pens a few bon mots of his own, such as:
In digressions lie lessons.
and
What children behold, they become.
Dirda’s most recent book is Classics for Pleasure, a collection of personal takes on some well-known and undeservedly obscure great books. Dirda would no doubt agree with Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s aphorism:
He who reads only the classics is sure to remain up to date.
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The classics should be rewritten every ten years.
Old age begins whenever you decide.
…dust into dust and dust becomes dusty layers piled up in wind-swept dunes. But no more tears are ever shed there over any unwritten questions.