Maxims…I can’t stop at just one. Just as the now proverbial Lay’s potato chip maxim would have it.

WORK

“The only good copies are those which show up the absurdity of bad originals.”

“Self-love is the greatest of all flatterers.”

“We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others.”

“We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.”

“None of our faults are as reprehensible as the methods we use to conceal them.”

“Before strongly desiring anything we should examine what happiness he has who possesses it.”

“Imagination could never invent the number of different contradictions that exist innately in each person’s heart.”

“There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had never heard that there was such a thing.”

“It is a kind of happiness to know just how unhappy we could be.”

—François de La Rochefoucauld
—from Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

WORD(S)

pilliwinks (or perriwinks, pyrwykes &c.). noun. An instrument of torture—a vice—similar to a thumbscrew, designed to squeeze the fingers. Also used to describe similar instruments for crushing the feet, knees and ears. In one of Anne Boleyn’s last letters she writes of “A pair of pyrwykes for my lady Princess, delivered to my lady mistress.” It is speculated they were used to shape the future Queen Elizabeth’s (notably long) fingers. See some examples of pilliwinks among way too many other torture devices on the Medieval Torture Page. Hat-tip: Reader K.

“They prick us and they pine us, and they pit us on the pinnywinkles for witches.” (Sir Walter Scott)

“A dun chicken, she said, sucked on her chin. When the pilliwinks were applied to her, she confessed.” (Virginia Woolf)

“And the path over to the house, around that outcrop?—we’d stick out like pilliwinked fingers.” (Charles Stross)

WEB

1. Hikaru Cho’s hyper-realistic yet disturbingly strange body paintings.

2. “The woman with a hole in her brain”. Related: “Man with tiny brain shocks doctors” (and they mean tiny, possibly tinier than my own). Both part of the New Scientist’s “Mindscape” series.

3. Greg Lindahl has done admirers of proverbs, maxims, epigrams and other such writings a great service, writing a script that extracted 1552 proverbs from A dictionarie of the French and English tongues published in 1611.

4. All four short essays in Peter Kalkavage’s Four Essays on Writing and Sentences are worthwhile, but “Sentences” (on Heraclitus “the dark”) and “Sentences Continued: The Unmasking of Man” (François de La Rochefoucauld) are particularly relevant today.

5. Today in 1613, François de La Rochefoucauld—noted author of maxims and memoirs—is born. For a few bucks plus shipping you can get your hands on The Life and Adventures of La Rochefoucauld, an enjoyable read about this thinker and great salon member’s life interwoven with his maxims.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. writes in to say, w/r/t the recent WORD demonym, a word created to fill a language void, “My word for ‘void in the language,’ in case anyone is interested, is ‘lexicuum.’ I tend to find more of these in the language than anyone else I know.” — That’s a portmanteau I can get behind.

• A different Reader K. than above writes in appreciation of this newsletter and that he was “very taken” with Jenni Baker’s Erasing Infinite project, noting its similarity to Tom Philips landmark A Humument (which I featured here before). Even better, he remarks that some of the WORD(S) have sparked ideas for his own work. — Thanks! There’s no higher compliment…

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: clippings@katexic.com.

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