{"id":118999,"date":"2017-12-07T09:00:16","date_gmt":"2017-12-07T14:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=118999"},"modified":"2017-12-07T10:19:25","modified_gmt":"2017-12-07T15:19:25","slug":"sentence-folds-neatly-half","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/07\/sentence-folds-neatly-half\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sentence That Folds Neatly in Half"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>In our eight-part series\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/category\/columns\/life-sentence\/\">Life Sentence<\/a>, the literary critic Jeff\u00a0Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence\u00a0Dolven chooses.<\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_119036\" style=\"width: 1034px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/tom-toro-quote-06-auden-finish-edited-12-6-17.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-119036\" class=\"size-large wp-image-119036\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/tom-toro-quote-06-auden-finish-edited-12-6-17-1024x895.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"895\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/tom-toro-quote-06-auden-finish-edited-12-6-17-1024x895.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/tom-toro-quote-06-auden-finish-edited-12-6-17-300x262.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/tom-toro-quote-06-auden-finish-edited-12-6-17-768x671.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-119036\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">\u00a9Tom Toro<\/p><\/div>\n<p>W. H. Auden was a compulsive aphorist. His poems and prose are heavily salted with wise maxims; here\u2019s one from a notebook he kept when he arrived in America, in 1939, published much later as <em>The Prolific and the Devourer<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The image of myself that I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others that they may love me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It strikes home, yes? Perhaps because, for all my public bonhomie, I have so many more serious things on my mind. Or because the love I want from others will aways have a measure of fear in it, fear of my rigor or my temper\u2014but really, all I want is to bring out the best in them. Or because I am so considerate, so habitually obliging and flexible\u2014but I do have my own views, and when the time is right, I will make them heard. Whoever I am, Auden\u2019s aphorism knows me, certainly better than others do, perhaps even better than I once knew myself.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>So what is so convincing about this sentence, what prompts the nod and the wry smile? The word <em>sentence<\/em>\u00a0itself used to be reserved for such knowing formulae. It is the English translation of the Latin <em>sententia<\/em>, the jewel of classical rhetoric, maxims fashioned and gathered by keepers of commonplace books from Erasmus to Lichtenberg to Auden himself. (Auden was a connoisseur: in 1966, with Louis Kronenberger, he published his own selection,\u00a0<em>The\u00a0Viking Book of Aphorisms<\/em>.) The compression of <em>sententiae <\/em>makes them happy for excerption and for transport. They do not depend on particular people to speak them or times or places to happen; their truth is universal, and they declare it with the same equanimity wherever they are found. Certain formal features bolster this claim to wisdom. Balance, for example. Auden\u2019s sentence folds neatly in half. If you were to suspend it by its \u201cis,\u201d it would hang in empty space like a Calder mobile, the words circling in calm and confident self-constellation. Thrift is important, too. It reuses all its key words, \u201cimage,\u201d \u201cmyself,\u201d \u201clove,\u201d one of each on each side of its fulcrum.<\/p>\n<p>So the sentence sounds true, true and wise, with the autonomy, the poise and abstraction that wisdom confers. But is it? True? Wise? Consider the following variant: \u201cThe image of myself that I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is the shadow of the image which I try to create in the minds of others that they may love me.\u201d The meaning of this <em>sententia <\/em>is opposite, but it is easy to make it plausible by application. I am full of doubts, but when I see others acquiesce to my assertive bluster, I feel a new self-certainty. Or, fearful, I frighten others, and see my invulnerability in their frightened eyes. And so on: now my private sense of self borrows its form from my public performance. The revised <em>sententia<\/em> has the same confident posture, poised above the mess of my circumstances. It is just about as balanced, and like Auden\u2019s, it drops \u201cin order\u201d from its second half, just to show that its wisdom isn\u2019t merely mechanical or pedantic. The slight negligent grace only enhances its confidence.<\/p>\n<p>It won\u2019t be news to anyone that the great, leather-bound volume of history\u2019s <em>Complete Aphorisms<\/em> is full of contradictions. <em>Sententiae<\/em> end up in those books not for their contribution to a self-consistent moral system but for their sudden, irresistible seduction, the sense\u2014almost as with a new lover\u2014that this, at last, is<em> the one<\/em>. And yet, Auden\u2019s poise is a detachment, too, the sentence not as the urgent story of anyone in particular but as a fleeting, timeless verity. He knew as well as anyone that a maxim is a mood, the momentary romance of a counter-intuition. The experienced lover of wisdom greets it with a smile and a nod that foresees already the fine thrill of its successor. The wisdom of the aphorist, who believes in a form, is different from the wisdom of the aphorism, which believes only in itself.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>Jeff Dolven\u2019s poems\u00a0first appeared in\u00a0<\/em>The\u00a0Paris Review<em>\u00a0in 2000. He teaches at Princeton University, and his new book,\u00a0<\/em>Senses of Style<em>,<\/em>\u00a0<em>which looks at the work and lives of Thomas Wyatt and Frank O\u2019Hara, will publish\u00a0in January.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Tom Toro is an American cartoonist whose work appears regularly in<\/em>\u00a0The New Yorker<em>,<\/em>\u00a0Playboy<em>,<\/em>\u00a0The American Bystander<em>, and elsewhere. His book of Trump cartoons,\u00a0<\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/dockstreetpress.com\/project\/tiny-hands\/\" target=\"_blank\">Tiny Hands<\/a><em>, is available now through Dock Street Press.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Read\u00a0earlier installments of\u00a0Life Sentence\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/category\/columns\/life-sentence\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In our eight-part series\u00a0Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff\u00a0Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence\u00a0Dolven chooses. W. H. Auden was a compulsive aphorist. His poems and prose are heavily salted with wise maxims; here\u2019s one from a notebook he kept when he arrived [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1291,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31258],"tags":[32051,32052,32053,32050,32049,2160],"class_list":["post-118999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-sentence","tag-complete-aphorisms","tag-erasmus","tag-lichtenberg","tag-louis-kronenberger","tag-viking-book-of-aphorisms","tag-w-h-auden"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Sentence That Folds Neatly in Half<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What rhetorical tricks make aphorisms sound so confident and unimpeachably true?\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/07\/sentence-folds-neatly-half\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Sentence That Folds Neatly in Half by Jeff Dolven\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 7, 2017 \u2013 In our eight-part series\u00a0Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff\u00a0Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. 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