‘Scratch an important nineteenth- or twentieth-century thinker and the chances are good that you will find a warm word or two for the work of G. C. Lichtenberg.’ G. C. Lichtenberg: a “spy on humanity”. ‘Lichtenberg once said that he would give part of his life to know what was the average barometric pressure in paradise. He never discovered that quantum, but in his aphorisms we have an extraordinary register of the barometric pressure of the human heart.

As a literary form, aphorisms have the liability of their strength. Aphorisms are insights shorn of supporting ratiocination. Sometimes they are arrived at in an instant, in a sudden illumination; sometimes, as Lichtenberg’s draftings and redraftings of the same phrase or idea reveals, they are arrived at through a process of intellectual and rhetorical honing. Bertrand Russell reports that when he told Wittgenstein that he should not simply state what he thought was true but should provide arguments, Wittgenstein replied that arguments spoil the beauty of insights and that “he would feel as if he was dirtying a flower with muddy hands.” Just so, aphorisms are the blossoms of thought. They may depend on stalk and soil, but their beauty is independent of those prerequisites.’ A 19th century herald of the weblogging spirit? Viz —

…(T)he notebooks were something else, a general repository, an intellectual clearinghouse, “a Book wherein I write everything, as I see it or as my thoughts suggests it to me.” Lichtenberg’s notebooks are a sort of omnibus. As J. P. Stern put it in Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions (1959)—the best book in English on Lichtenberg—they consist of “jottings, extracts, calculations, quotations, autobiographical observations, platitudes, witticisms, drafts as well as polished aphorisms.” Lichtenberg considered publishing at least portions of his notebooks but never did. His feelings about their value seemed to vacillate with his moods, which themselves vacillated wildly. Sometimes he referred to their contents as Pfennigs-Wahrheiten—“penny-truths”—at other times he waxed grandiloquent: “I have scattered seeds of ideas on almost every page which, if they fall on the right soil, may grow into chapters and even whole dissertations.”

…Lichtenberg’s acts of espionage on mankind were unsystematic even about being unsystematic. They were raids on the interesting, conducted as time, mood, and inspiration permitted. There is no unifying thread, though there are recurrent themes. One familiar theme is part description, part admonition: “It is almost impossible to bear the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard.”