Deep Guild

I

“Vita brevis, ars longa.”

“Life is short, art is long.”

This aphorism is one of the most seminal. It is credited to Hippocrates, who first wrote it in Greek 2,400 years ago.[1]

Originally introduced as a truth about medical practice, it has come to prove its own truth: that life is short, and art is long.

What do I mean? “Vita brevis, ars longa” is the opening aphorism in the Hippocratic Corpus. By saying that life is short and art is long, Hippocrates bemoans the difficulty of mastering medicine, or any art, within a single human lifespan. In other words, while mastery takes a long time, life is sadly short. The aphorism entices us to imagine what great works of art, music, or science we might produce were our years on this planet doubled or tripled.

This idea that our achievements are limited by our limited lifespans seems trivially true and so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning. And yet, as Hippocrates’ aphorism has continued to survive through the ages—because it has survived—it has taken on new significance. It has taken on an entirely different meaning. For we can also think of “vita brevis, ars longa” as a kind of celebration of art’s longevity: though life is short and people die, art survives. This is the consolation prize of the artist. Though he dies like everyone else, he achieves immortality through his work.

And see how this is borne out by “Vita brevis, ars longa” itself? Not only has the aphorism remained with us long after the death of the ephemeral man who wrote it, but we are now happily burdened with countless aphorisms that have outlived their authors.[2] Life is short; art is long, indeed.

So “vita brevis, ars longa” doesn’t merely suggest that art outlives its creator; it enacts and embodies that truth and will continue to do so as long as it survives on our tongues. The aphorism has thus become, in a sense, autological—a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This kind of recursive, performative “self-proof” is characteristic of many aphorisms, as we shall see.

But before we go further, we must ask: what is an aphorism? It would probably be best to start with a working definition… Or as the famous aphorist Cato the Elder once put it, “Rem tene, verba sequentur”—“Grasp the subject, the words will follow.”[3]

Pithy. But how to grasp the subject? Paradoxically, we must first grasp for words.

The Cambridge Dictionary tells us that an aphorism is “a short saying that is intended to express a general truth.”[4] But these two tendencies—being short and expressing truth —seem somewhat at odds. We moderns think that truth needs all thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. And wouldn’t a landscape only be truly defined by a fully rendered topographical mapthat is as expansive, as contoured, and as complicated as the thing itself?

But perhaps the ever-succinct aphorism’s refusal to exhaustively articulate truth is part of its success. Maybe it says something true about “truth.” The philosopher Simon May argues that aphorisms offer “isolated stabs at truth” that reflect a “partial experience of the world,” their inconclusiveness fitting for the “contemporary mind” that sees truth as “partisan” and “provisional.”[5]

II

But can our words thus never ring entirely true? Must we consign ourselves to be life’s wallflowers, never to ask the truth to dance, but only to tell our friends fragmentary half-truths about how we flirted with her once from across the room? And if we extrapolate from the tendencies of this “contemporary mind,”—this incel mind!—it seems it doesn’t matter what we say in an aphorism, so long as it is aphoristically brief and inconclusive—as if brevity wasn’t merely the “soul of wit,” but the only goal!

“Brevity is the soul of wit.” Another immortal aphorism.[6]

But all of this would seem to call into question the reliability of language itself—as if the more words we use, the more we are in danger of going astray. And if this is so… is the ultimate truth silence?

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it,” says Maurice Switzer, in a quote often misattributed to G.K. Chesterton.[7]

But this aphorism says at least two things here. On the one hand, the author is calling himself a fool, because, as he himself here implies, only fools say things—and he just said something!

But we might also call him wise for saying just enough to communicate a sagacious truth, because if we were to call him a fool for speaking, we would be endorsing the aphorism’s truth claim. The pleasure we get from reading this aphorism, and many aphorisms, is the understanding that they say more than is at first evident. They seduce us into teasing out their meanings, this knotwork of antitheses and paradoxes, to discover the surprises that their brevity leaves mostly unsaid.

The English polymath Francis Bacon said as much about aphorisms four hundred years ago, saying: aphorisms, “representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire further; whereas [scholastic] methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at furthest.”[8]

In other words, while exhaustive detail—the fully rendered topographical map—tends to render thinkers complaisant, turning them into passive consumers of knowledge, secure in feelings that they have already arrived at truth, an aphorism compels readers to compensate for its audacious lack—its refusal to spell out all its potential meanings. Its brevity isn’t merely truth or a half-truth;

It is a provocation

The fragment is designed to be expounded upon by pending participatory play, by the reader’s active wit.

This aligns with what William Empson has identified as the generative power of linguistic ambiguity, in which ambiguity is not a flaw to be corrected but the engine of poetic life.[9]

But aren’t all words ambiguous to a certain degree? Don’t they all require us to fill in the blanks?

A single word is shorthand for more words that are necessarily absent—the fuller explanation, the exhaustive detail of a million encyclopedias. Hegel suggested something like this in his Phenomenology of Spirit: “when I say ‘all animals’,” he says, “this expression cannot pass for a zoology [i.e., a study of all animals], so it is equally plain that the words, ‘the Divine’, ‘the Absolute’, ‘the Eternal’, etc., do not express what is contained in them […]”[10]

This inherent shortcoming of words is what prompted Samuel Johnson’s famous aphorism: “Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.”[11]

Pascal chimes in in a similar vein: “A town, a country-place, is from afar a town and a country-place. But, as we draw near, there are houses, trees, tiles, leaves, grass, ants, limbs of ants, in infinity. All this is contained under the name of country-place.”[12]

Of course, this infinite regress is found not only in words generally, but, as Pascal here implies, in our very physical reality. Everything we see tells us we do not see all, that there is always more behind each facade. Reality is a Russian nesting doll, pregnant with possibilities, and the job of curious, inquisitive, creative minds, like the reader of an aphorism, is to midwife the concentric echoes of any particular stratum.

III

Regarding perpetually pregnant Russian nesting dolls, let us turn to a related aphorism, one of my favorites. It is also one of the oldest on record and attributed to Heraclitus: “Nature loves to hide.”[13]

As one might expect, this aphorism has multiple applications and interpretations. Initially, and most obviously, it suggests that the causation of natural processes is at bottom elusive. The scientist, natures groom, tries to unveil her at the altar.

But if nature loves to hide, does she want her veil to be lifted for the scientist’s kiss? The lifting of the veil on the question of why the sky is blue—something something because blue light travels in shorter waves—posits another layer of veil to be lifted, another “why?” Why does blue light travel in shorter waves? There will always be another thin layer of gauze laced with question marks for nature to hide behind, blocking perfect consummation.

The Enlightenment gave us a mechanistic model of the universe—Descartes’s model bride: Nature as an automaton. The great clockmaker in the sky designed this mechanism and sent her spinning, but she is otherwise dead inside, with no personality, no ability to consent.

But what if nature is not some pliant, apathetic, robot bride with no will of her own or say in the matter? What if the union to be consummated is more reciprocal? The aphorism “Nature loves to hide,” if you really think about it, imbues nature with will and a playful personality. It puts the accent on loving as much as hiding. Maybe nature loves us back. Maybe she loves hiding because she loves playing hard to get and loves being found. But it’s a particular kind of “being found,” because in revealing to us her infinite regress of concealment, she reveals not only something about herself, but about us.

Ultimately, we find that, while aphorisms like “nature loves to hide” tell us something about the truth of the world around us, they also offer a looking glass of self-reflection into our own nature, our own inner life.

And while Nietzsche may have been half-right with his famous aphorism “We cannot look around our corner,”[14] that is to say that the perceiver has perspectival limitations based on his priors and biases, the aphorism “nature loves to hide” suggests that we might be met halfway—that nature or the muse will appear at the chink in the wall of apperception, and there offer a kiss, a fusion of horizons that leads to an augmentation of perspective, a revelatory poesis.

The hidden truth behind the blue sky is revealed by the poet—or what the blue sky makes the poet discover in himself.[15]

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[1] Hippocrates, The Aphorisms of Hippocrates, with a Translation into Latin and English, trans. Thomas Coar (London: A.J. Valpy, 1832), 1.

[2] See this famous fragment from Sappho, with a similar sentiment: “I say some one will think of us hereafter.” Cited in David Robinson, Sappho and Her Influence (Boston: Marshall Jones Company, 1924), 5.

[3] Cato the Elder, “Rem tene, verba sequentur,” in Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Elizabeth Knowles, 8th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 198.

[4] “Aphorism,” Cambridge Dictionary of American English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 33.

[5] Simon May, “The Return of the Aphorism,” Prospect Magazine, November 20, 1999.

[6] William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. John Livingston Lowes (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1914), 45.

[7] Maurice Switzer, Mrs. Goose, Her Book (New York: Moffat, Yard & Company, 1907), 29.

[8] Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis, preface by Thomas Case (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1938), 152.

[9] William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1949).

[10] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 11.

[11] Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Elizabeth Knowles, 8th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 430.

[12] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W.F. Trotter (Wiseblood Books, 2013), 65.

[13] Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).

[14] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 239

[15] For a thorough discussion on this “Orphic” truth, see Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).