OK, it looks like this might turn into something of a journal… since I obviously need to engage with thoughts and feelings I’m having by writing, but in any case…
2. Something brief about ‘maxims’; and one to be going on with
I only really became interested in maxims (or ‘aphorisms’ if you prefer) about two years ago when I picked up the notebooks of Joseph Joubert, a French Enlightenment aphorist.
What struck me about him was the amount of wisdom he could impart with such economy of words – his aphorisms are at once beautiful and expansive, and reading them you have the feeling of digesting a whole book.
After Joubert, I read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, but to be honest, no-one quite comes close to Joubert in beauty, truth and profundity. I actually lost my copy of his Notebooks on a train to Sheffield, and I do wonder what happened to it – if someone picked it up and perused my margin notes and little personal revelations, and what they actually thought of them… or if, more likely, it was immediately disposed of by a cleaner, which evokes a certain pathos I feel.
In any case, I think that ‘maxims’ have some affinity with ‘theories’. The essential project of a maxim is to reduce an expansive wisdom to its barest elements, to contain a whole realm of feeling or thought in a single sentence. For me, theories are the same; they embody a like desire to achieve what the mathematicians call ‘elegance’.
In this drive for ‘elegance’, there is beauty. Purity. And this is close to ‘truth’. These things have sibling affinity, and resonate emotionally.
I’m trying to find a rambling way to explain that I think the way INFJs – or any emotionally-based individual – connects with intellectual endeavours. They may not be aware of it; may believe that their project is a logical or practical one, but this is seldom the case at bottom.
Beneath the logical endeavour, there is often this grounding in a search for this kind of beauty (elegance, simplicity, purity, completeness, wholeness) – it is beauty in its most abstract, but beauty and feeling nonetheless. Their projects, however rational, are in fact driven by such feeling; coloured and dyed in it.
These thoughts are probably informed by my most dominant thoughts today – on the virtue of serenity and its attendant mood. My mood has thus been ‘white’, ‘pure’, ‘holy’, ‘benevolent’, ‘serene’. I posted an aphorism which expressed some truth about the virtue of serenity elsewhere, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. About the perfect form of words to express it (I think I’m going through a bit of a poetic renaissance to be quite honest). It goes like this:
Serenity. It is like the stoic steel quenched in love.
I feel that the virtue of serenity has a kind of stoicism to it, but it can’t be described as ‘toughness’ exactly. It can endure all hardships with its unfaltering benevolence – negative emotions it imbibes and neutralises with love. The heavy is made light, like air. So maybe this is better:
Serenity. It is like the stoic steel quenched in love and made light.
I want to capture how serenity is a ‘lightener’ of things; iron becomes air.
I understand that the stop is important: Serenity [stop]. It is like… and I’m overwhelmed by the beauty of language and how small things like this resonate with us in strange ways.
The stop imparts completeness to the word and perhaps gives us enough of a moment to consider its shape and its wholeness.
A sentence is its own thing, such that the power and independence of the word is lost if we render it thus:
Serenity is like the stoic steel quenched in love.
Instead:
Serenity. It is like the stoic steel quenched in love.
Both ‘serenity’ and ‘it’, reinforce the singularity of the word and of the concept; first in its wholeness (‘Serenity’), second as the object (‘it’) of the sentence. We thus use grammar to consider it twice from different angles. The power of feeling inherent in the aphorism is thus doubled in a certain sense.
I suppose you could use the same grammatical mechanism to consider it as the subject in a rendering like…
Serenity does.
I’m probably going to try this in latin… Anyway enough rambling.