Aphorisms

The picture is of the English novelist John Fowles (1926-2005). Amongst other works, he wrote "The Collector", "The Magus" and "The French Lieutenant's Woman". I thought he had so much merit as a writer that in early 1977 I picked him to be the main subject of my degree dissertation. I even wrote to him and very kindly he responded helpfully to the various questions I posed.

By that time, he was already living on the edge of Lyme Regis - a seaside town in the county of Dorset. By all accounts, there he lived a  quiet life - immersed in his reading and writing. For several years, he was also the voluntary director of the town museum but mostly he kept himself to himself. Unlike some published writers, he was not a natural socialite and did not enjoy blowing his own trumpet.

Following the success of his first book, "The Collector" (1963), John Fowles's next published book was entitled "The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas" (1964). It is a collection of aphorisms that he had been jotting down for most of his adult life. An aphorism is a  concise or pithy observation that contains a general truth or wise notion - something like a saying.

As a university student I would often reflect upon Fowles's aphorisms. It wasn't the kind of book that you were meant to read like a novel  - not a page turner. It was a book that you dipped in and out of  - gathering kernels of wisdom or morsels of food for thought:

• All of us are failures; we all die. Nobody wants to be a nobody. All our acts are partly devised to fill or to mask the emptiness we feel at the core. We all like to be loved or hated; it is a sign that we shall be remembered, that we did not 'not exist'.
• The profoundest distances are never geographical.
• The genius, of course, is largely indifferent to contemporary success; and his/her commitment to his/her  ideals, both artistic and political, is profoundly, Byronically, indifferent to their contemporary popularity.
• There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.
• We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
• Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
• I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.
• There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.

They are only words but an aphorism can focus the mind in ways that longer works will fail to achieve.  I'm glad that "The Aristos" was a useful companion book for me almost  fifty years ago. Those lines helped me to articulate ideas and reflections that I sometimes struggled to put into words even though some of John Fowles's  ideas were at odds with mine.