Jaír Villano’s Aphorisms

We are pleased to present for the very first time in English language these brilliant and original aphorisms by a young Latin American writer, Jaír Villano

One has to look after life in order to keep hating it.

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Be yourself. But before that, ask yourself who you are. There is no way of becoming that what you ignore. Most people are subjects who do not know themselves, they rush into any certainty but cannot really comprehend the raw eloquence of their contradictions and ignore the perplexity and nuances of their other personae. So they do not know themselves, they do not know who they are, they are what they believe they are because believing will always be easier.

The complex pain of being oneself is to take the issue to extreme lengths: understanding that being is not possible. This is being in its purest meaning: to be free. We are flawed from the day we are born. We choose over something we do not choose: existence, just to give an example. So, to be oneself is to be an approximation.

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It is difficult to write as it were easy.

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“History only tells the stories of awakened men”, says Lichtenberg. But, aren’t there those who live their lives as if they were in a dream? Those who claim to be happy and optimistic in a world like this one, cannot be more than the landscape of a fairy tale. The proof is that the daily tragedies of the world do not awaken them.

What is to be said of those who never wake up from their nightmares? That of being alive, I mean. That feeling of the cruel and ruthless weight of insomnia and its crippling ally: sleepiness.

“Nobody has ever thought about the sleeping man’s history”. All of Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies, prophets of the dreamy individual, are thrown into the bin..

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The price for changing from a dull and sleepy sobriety into loud and explosive drunkenness? To be worst than oneself.

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How many “I’s” do live and die in a relationship? How many ruminate personalities and facets will never be again brought to the public eye by the individual who shows himself to others? How many illusions wither in a farewell gesture? How many scents without the restrictions of the present and the blind and static march evoking the past? How many silences to be interpreted, yearning to reach the depths of what creates them?

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Loneliness is a lie. One always ends by being by oneself.

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To be an unpublished writer is better than to be a bad writer. Whoever writes bad stuff is a writer, the unpublished writer does not exist. Yet, it is possible to be more by not existing. It is one of art’s paradoxes.

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To love literature, not books. To revere reading and not the possession of an object. That has been taught to me by life and public libraries. Then it all became an issue about nihilism: I want to leave nothing for nobody. I correct myself: I want to leave nothing good for no one. In the end, and sadly for the rest, I write books.

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I was going to be a writer. But philosophy made me doubt.

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The tone is also the subject, the concept, the essence. I do not imagine Schopenhauer or Nietzsche grimacing, Cioran’s one is cynical, ferocious and malevolent. Yet it is also true that one chooses how to be read, in other words, how to be seen. The tone is the I of writing.

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So much tosh about the metaphysics of pain, so much searching for its philosophy. And the answer was not in Schopenhauer’s torment, nor Kierkegaard’s angst, nor the discipline of the great suffering by Nietzsche. The dentist, that therapist, numbed me. And in contrast with philosophy, there were no questions without answers.

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To be a lonely individual. Such a pleasure to know it. Such a horror to feel it.

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The more one knows oneself, the more one despises those who are similar to us.

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There are some who believe that one is what one shows on social media, not what one is in real life.

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We are accomplices of a virtual fraud: we make wrong assumptions of others by the reiteration of their projections.

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I would like to dispense with myself, but even at that I fail. 

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A good writer has to be a magnificent reader, but a magnificent reader is not necessarily a good writer.

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There was a time when one read literature not to fall asleep. Now, one reads literature and it stimulates sleep.

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It could be said that insomnia is a time with no content, given that any attempt to execute an action is nullified by a tiresome defenseless state. Insomnia disables us, holds us back, neutralises us. Who is oneself during insomnia? At most we are that being that hides itself during the day, that runs away from itself, that avoids itself among duties and turmoil. Are we not the image we control during the day, but the indomitable and agonising being during insomnia? Those hours loaded with cunning authority to conceive personal horrors undress us: the never-ending, trivial, transcendental thoughts, appreciable and unfathomable, repetitive and creative, installed in our heads. Suspended in darkness. Fatalism reigns during that moment: the human laying in its bed is its victim. There is no defense against its capacity to annihilate any glimmer of hope. In those hours, most times amassed in other restless hours, individuals witness their own flagellation. They are spectators observing the tyranny of a mind that finds the simplest -and therefore most effective- forms of self-injury. There is no truce in insomnia. The yearning for sleep is present, but it is mockingly avoided. To know that the time to rest is the time of torture is one of many cruelties that the individual lives with.

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The first defeat is the personal one. It means: the one deriving from personal incapability. The one that is not affected by exogenous or foreign elements concerning the defeated. There are two options: either accept it submissively, regretting the impossible while searching for comfort in compassion. Or make it an anchoring instrument: to see oneself in the world not as an individual but as a human: the world as a mirror. To accept failure as a symbol of other failures, the same as strength, the same as combat, the same as being one of many born into a world that demands triumph and success.

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Nietzsche is better known today, but less understood than yesterday. Media society reproduces his sentences without caring to understand his system, the emphasis of his roar, the will to power, the devaluation of the supreme values he discusses. His sickness and the grandiloquent exaltation of some of his aphorisms attract the attention of users that only care about replicating their syntactic effect on social media. The death of God and the eternal return are two of the most misinterpreted ideas and, maybe because of that, the most famous, as if before him there were no Hegel, no Mainlander, no myth; which means a precedent where he begins his path and then deviates. Heidegger, probably his most clear-headed reader, makes a pertinent call: “what is decisive… is to listen to Nietzsche himself, to ask alongside him, towards him, and at the same time against him, but in favor of the most common, internal and unique cause of the western philosophy.” The Nietzsche of the mountain would oust the vulgar and meaningless use of Nietzsche on social media. We, his followers, are afraid that the worst could happen:  the philosopher who altered truth becomes the most vain and conventional of all.

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Capitalism profits from its ruses and forms of slavery to market demonstrations of intelligence that are free by definition: reading is an example. Reading became a luxury, a privilege for some, or the non-profitable leisure of others. Cosmetic literature takes advantage of this scenario offering to the reader a wide and motley range, pretending to be as deep as diverse. Since reading is a socially celebrated activity, capitalism proposes products not to fill the need of random fun or the spontaneous leaning towards the knowledge that feeds curiosity, but a social need, an imperative to fulfill what becomes a requirement, a demand that is lauded and considered a cult activity. So there is no reading but consumption of books. There is no enjoyment but boasting. Dostoievski, Proust, Mann and Borges are not authors that can be entered with haste. It is not possible to chat with Heidegger in the moment before nocturnal rest. Cosmetic literature builds vedettes and epigonal styles, brands and authors who, the press and advertisement industry, make them seem as authentic stylists and great masters. Merchandise reading is the reading of pulp authors.

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The purpose of writing is not to ruin silence. You write to defeat it. Some words become different after being born, their purity is aborted when uttered, and then silence becomes present by its absence. Other words extinguish silence, demolish its existence, their ancient parade is invisible. The best words have the gift to accomplish something that could not be named in any other way. Those words should only be themselves, its mirror ignores the universe and creates it. They make that something that didn’t exist before their cheerful dance fades away

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If Cioran took his writings seriously he would not have lived for so long. He could not have bear the existence he regretted so much, the slap of consciousness, the inclemency of lucidity. The punishment of superiority. His case is that of the writer who adopts a public persona, protecting himself in a roar, a textual grin, a frenzy. Mainlander was less incisive in his apology to suicide, one single text and he killed himself. The Romanian spilled and prided about a pessimism that, instead of ending the agony and being coherent to his theory, kept producing more and more books. A pessimism incapable of effecting itself. A full-frontal war against all prophets, and a fairly partial one against himself. This makes him no less of an author, a belligerent and agile pen, but puts his ideas in doubt instead. The Cioran of life was not the Cioran of ferocity. Corollary: we can like an author even if we do not believe in him or her.

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There is so much dignity in not wanting to know oneself better.

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If I was an influencer in this society I would worry, I would be executing something frivolous, pathetic and extravagant…

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Reading our authors’ authors is one of the most honest ways of reverencing them.

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Netflix has to be thanked for making hangovers more tolerable: its series, in sobriety, would be unbearable.

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An important difference between a great writer and a lousy writer is that we even want to know the studs and corrections of the original. We feel that even in those discarded ideas there is something to learn.

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Those mysterious sounds of the dialectic of love. Those songs in the words, in the pronunciation of things, in the expressions to designate the other. The celebration of common and inherent expressions of all those in love: captive by a repetitive, aged and abused language, yet newborn in the sensuality of its use. How different is the name of the loved one in the lips of the lover before, during and after love?

The aphorisms here published are part of the still unpublished The Well of Disillusionment. In addition to being an aphorist, Jaír Villano is a literary critic and book reviewer for El Boletín Cultural y Bibliografico del Banco de la República, the first and longest-running cultural magazine in Colombia. He is also a university professor with a master's thesis on pain and nihilism in philosophy, letters and cinema as well as a columnist for El Magazín Cultural of the newspaper El Espectador de Bogotá. 

Translation from Spanish: Camilo Gónima / Main photo: Jorge Idárraga