Word: aphoristic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Earthy Aphorist. If the public was slow to discover Blair, young avant-garde artists were not. Such radicals as Edward Kienholz and Billy Al Bengston forgathered at the old house Blair had bought in Los Angeles, admired his paintings and delighted in his company. Blair always gave them coffee (he kept careful records on just how each guest preferred it) and his own home-baked bread, for which he won many prizes at county fairs. Afterward, everybody pitched horseshoes in the backyard and listened to Blair's inexhaustible tales of his and other people's pasts. His speech...
...Harford mansion. Simon, an erstwhile poet turned gimlet-eyed merchant, agrees-if he can absorb the entire firm and expunge his father's name. Deeper shades of Oedipus. In the end, mother goes mad; Simon and Sara's doom seems to await another play. The collegiate aphorist in O'Neill has sententiously announced: "Success is its own failure...
Human Perfidy. The novelist or essayist is a careful householder, hoarding his resources; the aphorist tosses his shiny gold coins on the floor, seeking neither to save nor to order them. That is why the art of aphorism has rarely been considered major. Yet it is through his misanthropic aphorisms that Bierce should enter literature for keeps. The confident, eupeptic American spirit also has its dark side. And of those writers who chose to dwell on its shadows, few perceived or portrayed them with greater clarity than Bierce. His agonized view of human perfidy, which he found everywhere, raps imperatively...
...aligning himself with the forces of evil Genet affirms the existence of the good, which makes him a moralist of a kind. But the Sartrean paradox does not altogether explain the demonic intensity and energy of Genet's writing. The source may be found in another French aphorist, Baudelaire, who said that "Everyman who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul." As a corollary, he who accepts the conditions of life-as Genet accepts the worst life can dish out-presumably finds his soul. The discovery would disconcert most men. Genet indeed suggests that...
...unicorn nibbled its last rose, and left the garden. But readers knew well enough what they had seen. James Thurber, who died at 66 last week, a month after an emergency operation to relieve a blood clot on the brain, was an aphorist of sad truths who mourned his times with laughter...