aphorisms, proverbs, and clichés

In the previous post I expressed hope that Emerson’s sentence might turn into a piece of popular wisdom: “His two is not the real two, his four is not the real four.”

Part of the lunch hour today was spent trying to imagine the sort of civilization that could give rise to such a saying. It would be an odd one. (A good friend of mine was once dating a woman from a Central Asian country, I won’t say which country, and she told us that a common line in family quarrels there is: “The earth should swallow you.”)

Once before I cited La Rochefoucauld’s pungent maxim: “It is to be doubted whether a traveller will find anywhere in the world regions uglier than the human face.”

And again, try to imagine a culture in which that statement were no longer the high-flying aphorism of a prominent literary figure, but rather a dusty old proverb expressing the wisdom of an established people. (“As the old Venetian proverb says, there is no region on earth uglier than the human face.”)

Of course, this sort of thing happens all the time. Consider Nietzsche’s “what does not kill me makes me stronger,” which had some surprise and bite the first time I read it in high school, but now turns out to appear (often without attribution) on coffee mugs and other corny memorabilia.