Vectors: 45 Aphorisms
and Ten-Second Essays

1.
It's so much easier to get further from home than nearer that
all men become travelers.

2.
Of all the ways to avoid living, perfect discipline is the most
admired.

3.
Idolaters of the great need to believe that what they love
cannot fail them, adorers of camp, kitsch, trash that they
cannot fail what they love.

4.
Say nothing as if it were news.

5.
Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds
on?

6.
Despair says, I cannot lift that weight. Happiness says, I do
not have to.

7.
What you give to a thief is stolen.

8.
Impatience is not wanting to understand that you don't
understand.

9.
Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method.

10.
Harder to laugh at the comedy if it's about you, harder to cry
at the tragedy if it isn't.

11.
Patience is not very different from courage. It just takes
longer.

12.
Even at the movies, we laugh together, we weep alone.

13.
I could explain, but then you would understand my
explanation, not what I said.

14.
If the saints are perfect and unwavering we are excused
from trying to imitate them. Also if they are not.

15.
Easy to criticize yourself, harder to agree with the criticism.

16.
Tragic hero, madman, addict, fatal lover. We exalt those who
cannot escape their dreams because we cannot stay inside
our own.

17.
Every life is allocated one hundred seconds of true genius.
They might be enough, if we could just be sure which ones
they were.

18.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder: then it is only distance
that separates us.

19.
How much less difficult life is when you do not want
anything from people. And yet you owe it to them to want
something.

20.
Where I touch you lightly enough, there I am also touched.

21.
If we were really sure we were one of a kind, there would be
no envy. My envy demeans both of us — no wonder it is the
hardest sin to confess. It says I am not who I think I am
unless I have what you have. It says that you are what you
have, and I could have it.

22.
Laziness is the sin most willingly confessed to, since it
implies talents greater than have yet appeared.

23.
If you reason far enough you will come to unreasonable
conclusions.

24.
The one who hates you perfectly loves you.

25.
What you fear to believe, your children will believe.

26.
Of our first few years we remember nothing: experience only
slowly gives us the power to be formed by experience. If this
were not true, our characters would be completely
determined by our infant hours of darkness, pain, and
helplessness, and we would all be the same. For her first six
months my daughter cried continuously, who knows why.
Yet she is as happy and trusting and kind as if all that had
never happened. It never did.

27.
The road not taken is the part of you not taking the road.

28.
We invent a great Loss to convince ourselves we have a
beginning. But loss is a current: the coolness of one side of a
wet finger held up, the faint hiss in your ears at midnight,
water sliding over the dam at the back of your mind, memory
unremembering itself.

29.
If I didn't spend so much time writing, I'd know a lot more.
But I wouldn't know anything.

30.
The wounds you do not want to heal are you.

31.
When my friend does something stupid, he is just my friend
doing something stupid. When I do something stupid, I have
deeply betrayed myself.

32.
If I didn't have so much work to keep me from it, how
would I know what I wanted to do?

33.
My deepest regrets, if I am honest, are not things I wish
were otherwise, but things I wish I wish were otherwise.

34.
I lie so I do not have to trust you to believe.

35.
Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery.

36.
To me, the great divide is between the talkative and the quiet.
Do they just say everything that's on their minds, even before
it's on their minds? Sometimes I think I could just turn up my
head like a Walkman so what's going on there could be heard
by others. But there would still be a difference. For inside the
head they are talking to people like them, and I am talking to
someone like me: he is quiet and doesn't much like being
talked at; he can't conceal how easily he gets bored.

37.
Anger has been ready to be angry.

38.
It's easier to agree on the future than the past.

39.
Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half
is preventing people from reading what they expected you to
mean.

40.
They gave me most who took most gladly of my love.

41.
Back then I wanted to be right about my estimate of my
abilities. Now I want to be wrong.

42.
Time heals. By taking even more.

43.
Self-love, strange name. Since it feels neither like loving
someone, nor like being loved.

44.
What I hope for is more hope.

45.
To feel an end is to discover that there had been a beginning.
A parenthesis closes that we hadn't realized was open).



James Richardson
Ploughshares
Volume 26, Number 1
Spring 2000

Copyright 2000 by Emerson College.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Copyright 2000 The Daily Poetry Association
"http://www.poems.com/today.htm"


janet paterson
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