Word: proverb
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Half of those who divide quote Benchley and his fellow aphorists. The other half prefer proverbs. And why not? The aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general. A proverb is anonymous human history compressed to the size of a seed. "Whom the gods love die young" implies a greater tragedy than anything from Euripides: old people weeping at the grave site of their children. "Love is blind" echoes of gossip in the marketplace, giggling students and clucking counselors: an Elizabethan comedy flowering from three words...
...proverb," said Cervantes, "is a short sentence based on long experience," and to prove it he had Sancho and his paisanos fling those sentences around like pesetas: "There's no sauce in the world like hunger"; "Never look for birds of this year in the nests of the last"; "Patience, and shuffle the cards." His English contemporary was of two minds about folklore, as he was about everything. Hamlet disdains it: "The proverb is something musty." Yet the plays overflow with musty somethings: "Men are April when they woo; December when they wed"; "A little pot and soon...
...proverb has it, the more things change, the more they are the same. Even up here, my health is precarious: as I used to write you in clinical detail during my years of childhood, adolescence and maturity, I suffer from hay fever, chills, diseases of the urinary tract and bowels, insomnia and aches of the joints. Perhaps disease is what guards my moral sense. As I wrote in Remembrance of Things Past, "Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; we obey pain...
Reminded of this ancient Syrian proverb when recently given a copy of The Crimson 15 March 1983. I thought to make a belated response to the outcry of one Hieromonk Auxentios, a visitor at Harvard in the spring. Perhaps a few Crimson readers will remember the good Hieromonk's letter to the Editors, his dismay at the disrespect shown him and his abbot by certain students, presumably Harvard students, and how he indicted the entire University for intolerance and disregard for the ancient traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church. Now I am likewise a "traditionalist" Greek Orthodox monk, dressed...
...even treason. Nkomo says, a bit disingenuously, "I am only trying to protect my people and therefore do good for my country." The sharp-tongued Eddison Zvobgo, a minister in the Mugabe government, says Nkomo's real trouble is that he suffers from "power-denial psychosis." An Ndebele proverb puts it another way: "The beast is without power." Against the strong political base of Mugabe and the might of his army, Nkomo has little leverage except perhaps the capacity to plunge his country into civil...