Читать книгу A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical - W. E. Gutman - Страница 11

THIS I BELIEVE

“Solitude knocks at the door only when invited,” my grandmother used to say. She suffered neither fool nor whiner gladly. My uncle, a hopeless romantic, asserted that “flirting is a science; loving is an art.” An aunt, a notorious adulteress, justified her innumerable trysts by pleading that “never to lie, never to deceive is a feat only an imbecile can perform.” My father, a country doctor who lacked a scintilla of entrepreneurial spirit, warned that “the transaction that brings the highest dividends is the one not yet concluded.” My maternal grandfather, an electrical engineer and amateur humorist, liked to say that “intelligence is a battery that can be recharged only when plugged into someone else’s intelligence.” And, shortly before she died, in a moment of agonizing self-awareness, his daughter -- my mother -- whispered, “To live with death in one’s soul is to die alive.”

For all their pithiness, poignancy or devilish wit, aphorisms evoke what is already there in the glaring light of day. It’s the hyperbolic nature of subjective truth that transforms perceived reality into a grotesque parody of itself. But the essential lessons they convey, even metaphorically, speak volumes about those who coined them, about their lives and times, about the hopes, joys and sorrows that inspired them. More profoundly, what emerges from their confluent parts is the culture of cynicism, circumspection and stoicism that favored their survival.

Crafted over the generations by members of my clan, countless aphorisms were already common currency when I was a boy. They may have influenced the man I would become:

Avoid the arbitration of those who call themselves “neutral.”

Man discards the debris of his subconscious by dreaming.

Society jettisons the detritus of its conscience by eliminating dreamers.

Only fools think they’re always right.

One tolerates more readily the meanness of an idiot

than the stupidity of a cruel man.

Society censures abortion not because it robs it of a genius or a virtuoso, but because it deprives the state of a taxpayer and the church of a hostage.

Money is like fire. It can warm your feet or burn your socks.

A political slogan is tripe in pill form that only imbeciles swallow whole.

Never honest with itself, history unfolds while historians deform it.

One starts out being a portrait; one ends up being a caricature.

Men are by nature ungovernable, which is why they clamor for laws they’re unfit to obey.

When politicians keep pointing fingers at each other, it’s the voters who eventually give them the finger.

The pernicious spirit of religion is that it considers temptation as much of a sin as the misdeed it invites.

To appreciate exile one must have endured the indignities of the regime that inflicted it.

Eat today if you hope to be hungry tomorrow.

Beware of those who haven’t yet betrayed you.

Always get even in advance.

If you can’t afford a hired killer, try blasphemy.

Words have the right to be, even if they sting.

To be credible, journalism can’t afford to be harmless.