I like writing aphorisms as they help me with my ideas. I think one of every ten I write is okay. Here I present some recent ones I wrote on grief:
When Hamlet’s Claudius calls prolonged sorrow ‘unmanly’, he proves his crown is too small for his heart.
Grief is the cost we pay for being-with-others.
Grief turns memory into a anvil. What was once an archive becomes the fire for re-casting the self.
When remembrance cannot raise the dead, it canonises them.
To fear grief is to mistake a mirror for a dagger.
You call grief a journey to disguise the fact that it has no destination.
The mourner envies the dead, not for tranquillity but for certainty.
The dead survive in grammar: past-tense, third person, permanent exile.
Philosophers stall at death's edge; grief leaps into the chasm, giving a verdict without delay.
Between depression and mourning stands an object. Remove it, and sorrow becomes a mist.
The corpse keeps its secrets; grief invents them.
Grief is one of the sharpest proofs of meaning.
Immortality would destroy grief - and with it the final proof that we ever loved.
Every genuine lament contains a quieter judgement: ‘I am diminished’.
The deceased cease acting yet still direct; we improvise around their missing cues.
Each tear erodes the fiction that autonomy is singular.
The irreplaceable one exposes how interchangeable the rest remain.
A funeral is the brief admission that relationships outlive their objects.
We mourn even those who failed us; hope, not benefit, sets the price of attachment.
The dead do not vanish; they oblige us to redefine the pronoun ‘I’.
Kübler‑Ross gave grief five tidy boxes; existence keeps returning the coffin: wrong size again.
Pathology begins where the relationship is forgotten; the mourner stays ‘ill’ by refusing that cure.
Psychology measures how long you stagger; phenomenology asks who you were carrying.
Analytic philosophy wields logic as an anaesthetic for grief; the only thing it numbs is the philosopher.
Grief is the ontology of absence, an impossible desire arguing with empirical anatomy.
If annihilation ended everything, we would not still talk to photographs.
When culture shrinks funerals to an hour, grief retaliates by making private time immeasurable.
To pathologise sorrow is to amputate the part of the self that still speaks the dead one’s name.
Philosophical praise of Socrates’ calm. A chosen death transfers unresolved obligations to the survivors.
Analytic accounts that calculate ‘deprivation to the deceased’ omit the moral fact that survivors acquire new, non‑optional duties of adaptation.
Andrew.
truth
Interesting thoughts.