Scriptures, aphorisms, proverbs, sayings

 I grew up on scriptures, bite-sized bits of the Bible that people memorized and quoted.

The form of those short sayings is important, I think. The sayings are short enough to stick in memory. Some people use them as guideposts or street signs. They tend to pop up in my memory when I’m lost, even just briefly.

The biblical book of Proverbs is a collection of these sayings. But they’re everywhere.

After a long day, if the Wise Woman has one more chore for me, I do not say that I’m tired and need to rest. I say, hearing my father’s voice instead of my own:

 

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

 

When I was a boy, the people around me quoted scripture. Later I discovered writers known for their aphorisms and maxims. I discovered that people who were not religious or were opposed to religion compiled short thoughts that seemed to me to be in scripture form. The idea that this form of literature, wisdom literature, was older than the Bible and was as varied as human culture struck me was wonderful.

All this to get to one point: I think it’s interesting how we use these sayings.

The great ethical systems taught by the philosophers — Aristotle, Kant, Mill — strike me as intensely interesting but not often useful. Even as a student, I just couldn’t believe that anyone really made a moral decision about giving spare change to a beggar by doing some kind of calculation involving the greatest possible good for the greatest number of people.

We occasionally agonize over decisions for days. But when an adult is beating a child in the grocery store, we sometimes don’t react rationally — we just react. We are barely conscious of what impels us to intervene or turn away.

In between, it seems to me, are the vast number of cases where we face a moral question. We are lost — not profoundly, but temporarily. We need a street sign, rather than treatise on how to live our lives. We just need to get our bearings. Those aphorisms and proverbs come to mind.

The way we use those bits of literature is interesting to me. I wish more scholars would get interested in that topic.