Aphorisms

From Susan Sontag (in the essay, Mind as Passion, regarding Elias Canetti)

"The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is 'everything.' It allows entries of all lengths and shapes, and degrees of impatience and roughness, but its ideal entry is the aphorism."

Thus, one of Canetti's aphorisms, oddly appropriate to our course:

"'culture' is brewed up by the vanities of patrons. It is a dangerous love potion that distracts attention from death. The purest expression of culture is an Egyptian grave, where everything is gathered about in vain – utensils, jewelry, food, pictures, sculpture, prayers – and still the deceased is not alive."
- from The Human Province