Aphorisms

Yesterday, my professor gave the whole class a book. For free. I love free things, never mind the fact it came from my least favorite professor. It didn't do anything to improve my opinion of the professor, but I thought I should at least show I was grateful. So, to show the professor that I was indeed grateful for his gift, I figured I'd show my anticipation and giddiness by diving right into it; right at that moment. I suppose I should mention he gave the books out at the beginning of class. Turns out, the book was an absorbing little time waster. It's called Or So I Say: Contentions and Confessions, authored by Robin Skelton, and given the label "A Happenstance Book". It's a collection of aphorisms, or--thanks Wikipedia--, "an original thought, spoken or written in a laconic and memorable form". A book of one-liners; not a collection of others', they were all penned by him. Many I didn't agree with, and he clearly wasn't a Christian, but a few were though provoking:

• When illness becomes a state of mind, the mind itself is an illness.
• Age is a matter of attitude, not chronology.
• The will to succeed is all too often the desire to imitate.
• You don't get to the top by sitting on your bottom.
• What is considered self-discipline is often nothing more than self-denial regarded as self-assertion.
• When my wife tells me I am wonderful I believe her; when anyone else does so I am dubious.
• I have always been a revolutionary, though never a politician.
• Autobiography: the fantasies of the self-therapist and the self-justifications of the traduced.
• The danger of a large vocabulary is the desire to employ it.
• If all you want is money, money is all you'll get.
• I detest wearing fancy dress; I am a poor liar.
• I teach because I must continue to learn.
• When opportunity knocks, first look through the spyhole.
• Strength is always an admission of weakness.

Thought provoking, yes; given the right frame of reference. These aphorisms, from the same book, make it clear Skelton's frame of reference isn't the same as mine:

• God is an adjective, not a noun.
• When I look again at Christianity I feel as if I am stepping back into a playpen.
• Those who create a deity are created by it.

This definitely makes him sound like a man dead set against Christianity. But other aphorisms, or as Skelton calls them , "catchphrases with class" make me think there is more to Skelton's views, and hidden is a deep-rooted insecurity:

• Christians frighten me.
• At ninety three I suspect that I might not desire reincarnation, but rather fear it.

Why the fear and insecurity? For those of you who attended the Deroche college retreat, this made me think of the final moment of the film Collision, and Hitchens’ moment of seeming insecurity when he said that if there was only one Christian left in the world, he would not convert them to atheism. In Collision, Hitchens is accused, correctly, of suffering from presuppositional  kleptomania. Given Skelton’s conclusions in the first cluster of aphorisms, his vehement denial in the second, and his insecurity in the third, I can’t help but liken Skelton to Hitchens and wonder what the film would have been like had Skelton participated. I guess not a whole lot different.