Just stumbled on this wonderful aphorism by the Italian writer Amedeo Ansaldi at James Geary’s aphorism blog:
We always choose our enemies among those whom we would have liked to become. They are our lost image.
Something to keep in mind as the notion of Putin’s “evil” is being bandied about, often by neocons who supported our illegal adventure in Iraq and who are clearly “soft on irony.”
I discovered Geary’s blog thanks to Perpetual Birder and fine poet David Giannini, who sent me there to read a sampling of William Stafford’s aphorisms, drawn from a new book called Sound of the Ax: Aphorisms and Poems by William Stafford. Geary, I have to print out, heard about the Stafford book from Jim Finnegan, whose blog ursprache I follow with pleasure. I also want to mention that Ansaldi’s work appears in The New Italian Aphorists, a collection of aphorisms produced by “writers who took part in the three Aphorism International Prize ‘Torino in Sintesi’ Festivals.”
The links above, like the links in any of my posts, are a map-in-flux of my self-education. It’s the one country that holds my deepest allegiance.