WHY APHORISMS and homilies?

Simple. Because they are the most durable form of written word, and because they are divine. They endure precisely because they are divine; while all that is most worldly in prose may be known by its inherent perishability. Some writers have the modest -- no, let us say 'the puny' -- ambition of being read only that day, or the next day. Some want to be read in a year, or five, or fifty years. They call that success. Others anticipate readers one hundred or even a thousand years hence. Now that, to them, is something. I do not blush to state my desire to be read at least five thousand years from now. I want to be relevant then, as now. Thoreau says, "Read not the times, read the eternities," and the adage may as well be converted to advise the writer as well as the reader: "Write the eternities." Is it really an absurd, a megalomaniacal ambition, to write for the ages, -- and for the immortals? Goethe says, I think, that a man who anticipates less than fifty-thousand readers should not bother to write (or bother the printers to print). I say the same thing, not about the number of readers, but the number of years, and I think it would be arrogant to write, to bother, with anything smaller in mind.