Selected Aphorisms #37
Posted: March 10, 2009 Filed under: Aphorisms | Tags: aphorism, block quotes, Pierre Hadot 2 Comments »The thirty-seventh installment in our very plagiarizing new series.
Pierre Hadot quotes the following at length in his book Philosophy as a Way of Life – a.k.a. Number One Top Jam on The New Enthusiast pop charts this month. It’s from George Friedmann’s La Puissance de la sagesse and it goes a little something like:
To take flight every day! At least for a moment, which may be brief, as long as it is intense. A “spiritual exercise” every day – either alone, or in the company of someone who also wishes to better himself. Spiritual exercises. Step out of duration … try to get rid of your passions, vanities, and the itch for talk about your own name, which sometimes burns you like a chronic disease. Avoid backbiting. Get rid of pity and hatred. Love all free human beings. Become eternal by transcending yourself.
This work on yourself is necessary; this ambition justified. Lots of people let themselves be wholly absorbed by militant politics and the preparation for social revolution. Rare, much more rare, are they who, in order to prepare for the revolution, are willing to make themselves worthy of it.
Bizam! Oh no you didn’t, George Friedmann.
McSweeney
Carson Cistulli
Dan Woytek
daynperry
Najib
Sean Casey
Dan Lurie
I don’t want to get into it or anything, but I think there might be a slight mistake in translation here…
I’m 99% sure that, in the original French, “the itch for talk about your own name, which sometimes burns you like a chronic disease” is actually a highly poetic and elaborate euphemism (like “la petite mort”) for gonorrhea.
Actually, Michel, La Petite Mort is what we used to call my second uncle on my mother’s side, Mort Nussbaum. Uncle Mort – and I’m not frigging with you here – Uncle Mort was literally knee-high to a grasshopper. Hell of a guy, though, that Mort. Bought me my first nudie mag: some Czech thing with all these women doing unspeakable things to cabbage.