An Aphorism A Day for All of May!
I’m behind on my companion essay for chapters 13 & 14 of our read-along of C.S. Lewis’s Miracles. I’m sorry about that! Things have been crazy this week, lots of YouTube videos due; I’m teaching a course on systematic theology at my church and Sunday is the first class so I’ve been prepping that; and I dislocated my left pointer finger at wrestling practice on Tuesday which set me back a little bit too. So, I’m pushing back the essay to next Wednesday and pushing back next week’s companion essay to the Wednesday after that. Sorry about that, but hopefully that will give the folks who’ve fallen behind some time to catch back up with us.
Our next book club Zoom call is happening this Sunday, the 4th, at 7pm central! So upgrade to a paid subscriber if you want in on that. I’ll send the link in the paid subscriber convo beforehand.
In the meantime, let me tell you about a fun new project I’m doing. I’ve written on aphorisms before here on Substack and I’ve made some videos on them over on my YouTube channel, ParkNotes. A couple people have suggested that I do something like an aphorism a day on Twitter or Instagram stories or something. I don’t get much traction on other platforms and I pretty much hate Twitter, so I never gave it much thought. But then randomly last night it hit me that doing an aphorism a day on Substack notes would be perfect. Substack folks like to read stuff! And I get decent interactions here as well, so maybe I can get some good feedback to help me craft better aphorisms. And it just so happened to be the first of the month when I had this epiphany—too perfect not to jump on it.
But more important to me than engagement or constructive feedback is developing the habit of daily writing and thinking in an aphoristic way. I have this dream of becoming an old wizened sage and I think one of the best ways to help myself achieve this goal is to learn how to wrap my advice, opinions, and thoughts in a pithy aphorism. So here’s hoping that writing at least one aphorism a day for the month of May will help me establish the habit and get better at rattling them off at will. I’ve been keeping a journal of aphorisms for a while now but this will help me fill it up on a more regular basis. When it’s done, it may also be a cool artifact for my daughter to thumb through after I’m gone.
So you can find my aphorisms from each day over on my notes feed right here on Substack during the month of May, 2025.
You may be asking “what is an aphorism?”
An aphorism is a form of sententiae or wise saying. R.J. Hollingsdale analyzes aphorisms along 4 qualities in his introduction to Georg Lichtenberg’s collection of aphorisms called The Waste Books. He says that aphorisms are distinguished by the following four qualities:
Aphorisms are brief, isolated, witty, and philosophical. Being philosophical sets them apart from sententiae like epigrams which are basically witty observations. Being witty sets aphorisms apart from sententiae like proverbs and maxims, which are meant to be more straight forward truths.
I’m writing a chapter on sententiae for my book, Journal Like a Philosopher, and of all the sententiae I’ve been researching, aphorisms are the best. Proverbs are a close second, followed by dictums, then epigrams, then maxims, axioms, and then platitudes. I’ll write more on each of these and a bit more on aphorisms and the research comes along, but for now I’ll leave it here and try to give you 31 examples of the best form of sententiae this month over on my notes. Feel free to come join me on the adventure and just catch up by adding 3 to your notes today, or 4 if you’re reading this tomorrow, etc. etc.