Word: aphoristically
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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...
...Aphorist for an Anxious...
...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...
...There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books." wrote Georg Lichtenberg, an 18th century German aphorist. "Printed by people who don't understand them, sold by people who don't understand them, bound, criticized, and read by people who don't understand them, and now even written by people who don't understand them." A look at the current bestseller list (see p. 84) gives Lichtenberg the air of a prophet. The fiction crop is one of the poorest in years. Items...