The Teeth of Time

How I Found My Voice -- and Lost It Again

My first book was published by W. W. Norton, the oldest and largest employee-owned publishing house in the United States. The book was, as usual for scholars, a version of my dissertation. But an inverse version.

My major graduate school mentor, at that time “the dean of American religious historians,” was Winthrop Still Hudson. He advised me to write a book, not a dissertation, “so you don’t spend months of your life changing its dissertation diapers” to get it ready for publication as a book.

My dissertation advisor, however, was Milton Berman, an expert in intellectual, social and cultural history. After he read my “book,” he gave it back to me and said “unacceptable as a dissertation.” When I asked why, he informed me that the highest form of reasoning and academic writing was abstract and theoretical. What I handed him was filled with metaphors, stories, aphorisms, and other bibelot “unbecoming a serious scholar.” He laid down the gauntlet: get rid of all your metaphors, which are really “just ornamentation and decoration,” and then he would take the dissertation seriously.

So I spent the next few months wrapping new dissertation diapers on the baby book now laid out on the procrustean bed of academe. I remember deleting metaphor after metaphor, story after story, anecdote after anecdote, each cut feeling more like an amputation than an academic cleansing.

Then I discovered Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, the highest and most lasting form of communication is not abstract but aphoristic. He made this clear in The Twilight of the Idols (1889) and even earlier in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and in his unpublished 1873 essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” which appeared only posthumously thanks to his sister. This is where some of his most famous passages (mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, maxims, anthropomorphisms) are found.

While I have rejected Nietzsche the philosopher, I have a life-long embrace of Nietzsche the craftsman and his dictum from Mixed Opinions and Maxims #168 (1879)--“a good aphorism is too hard for the teeth of time, and all the millennia cannot succeed in consuming it, though it serves every time for nourishment; this is the great paradox of literature: the imperishable in the midst of all that changes.”

Why was Nietzsche, along with other writers like Oscar Wilde and Michel de Montaigne, so enamored of aphorisms? Because aphorisms are open and thus disruptive. They are the enemies of closed systems. They leave room for, in fact require, rumination and reflection. They are not easily digested. Their distillation and condensation of thought doesn’t “settle” something but rather unsettles it, and forces the mind to think twice and thrice. Aphorisms are anti-consumption and pro-conception. Their paradoxical stickiness and provocative punchiness force us to do more than swallow them whole.

Style is an outward and visible form of inner formation and inward substance. Over a lifetime of writing, I have labored to turn the abstract into aphorism, to convert cold conceptions into sensory perceptions and to fondle difficult ideas until they are distilled into the simplicity on the other side of complexity. Then I keep stroking these simplexities until they purr like a maxim or mantra that can withstand the teeth of time. The ideal for me is to end every paragraph with an aphoristic summary of the reasoning that preceded it.

But Nietzsche didn’t think aphorism was the ultimate in communication. He prized Thus Spake Zarathustra (1884) as his (and all of history’s) best book. Zarathustra is dithyrambic more than aphoristic. In other words, for Nietzsche and for me, the highest form of communication is a song. Meaning is embodied, incarnated, and best sung rather than merely stated. I have written the theology of sound (A Tale of Two Swords: In the Beginning was the Song), but I have not done this with my writing and turned my own prose from aphorisms into music.

Ironically, just as I began longing to make my prose sing rather than just spark, machines learned to imitate the spark.

One of the barbed blessings of writing in the AI Age, which arguably began with the public launch of ChatGPT on 30 November 2022 and the generative AI boom that followed, is that an aphoristic bent is one of the most defining stylistic signatures of default Large Language Model (LLM) prose. What I spent a lifetime acquiring as a jaunty style and distinctive literary craft has been flattened into an algorithmic habit. AI has learned the outward signature without living the inward pilgrimage that inspired it.

To be sure, AI aphorisms mostly serve as closures, while mine are designed as openings–a lingering, haunting disruption of thought. But just today, alas, I found myself reining in my aphoristic tendencies searching once again to keep my prose authentically human—but my version of human, not academic or algorithmic human.

The battle has changed. Once I had to rescue my prose from academic abstraction. Today I must rescue it from algorithmic imitation.