Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (39 page)

But back to Virginia for a moment. What is her next thought? It’s the following: “What about Susan? How much did
she
get this time?” Yet another trivial analogy! Now Virginia is comparing herself with a close friend, also a novelist, and with whom Virginia has always felt a vague sense of rivalry of which she is a bit ashamed, but what can she do about that? Wondering about the size of her friend’s royalties is a knee-jerk reflex, and she can’t suppress it. It’s a perfectly normal psychological pressure pushing for a mapping to be made. Obviously she knows that no oracle is going to supply her with the unknown figure, but that doesn’t in the least keep her from wondering about it.

At last, Virginia takes a closer look at her own royalty statement, comparing the amounts that her various novels have brought her this time. Once again, she’s making a series of mini-analogies — I compare the income due to my most recent tale
Carnival after Doomsday
with the incomes due to my previous books
Symphony in Ugly Minor, Hike of the Hellbound
, and
The Tyranny of Well-behaved Moppets
.

There will no doubt be some who will protest that we are not talking about analogies here, but just about simple comparisons between numbers. But in fact it’s a good deal more than just that. These figures are all members of the category
royalty
amounts
, and they all apply to the same novelist, and moreover, they all belong to the same biannual statement. It would never have crossed Virginia’s mind to compare her income from
Carnival after Doomsday
with a random figure, such as the price of her hairdryer or her county taxes ten years ago, let alone the temperature in Beijing or the number of lions in the local zoo. To be sure, she’s comparing one numerical figure with another one, but she’s doing so because the two figures have a tight conceptual connection and because making this comparison will afford her some kind of insight into her life. It’s undeniably an analogy — an analogy between the royalties brought to her by two of her books — a trivial analogy, admittedly, but no less an analogy for its simplicity or naturalness.

Mark is reading the newspaper. He sees that the swimmer Michael Phelps, shortly after winning his umpteenth gold medal in the Olympics, has just said, “I was hoping to break the world record in this race, but okay, I guess a gold medal isn’t too bad.” Mark asks himself, “Is that guy Phelps arrogant, or what?!” And in order to think about it more clearly, he wonders, “Well, what would
I
have said if I’d been in his shoes?” Comparison, analogy — no doubt about it. And more generally, in order to relate more deeply to the article he’s reading, Mark imagines, as would any of us, what it would be like to be a world-class swimmer at the tender age of 23, what it would feel like to be there and to participate in all these events, to be madly churning down the final lap and to see one’s own hand touching the wall ahead of all others, to throw one’s arms in the air in jubilation, to receive congratulations from one’s teammates, to hear loud rounds of cheering, and so forth.

This is how we human beings understand such an event — we try to mentally simulate it, inserting ourselves into it by likening it to events that we have known in our lives. Perhaps Mark himself once won a medal long ago; in that case, the memory of that event will jump to mind instantly. Perhaps he never participated in competitive sports but once swam very fast in a friend’s swimming pool, and his friend voiced amazement; he will recall it vividly. Perhaps he was once warmly congratulated by a bunch of his schoolmates; then that memory will come to mind. Perhaps one time in school he was called up to the stage to receive some award, and this lovely souvenir comes back to him. That’s how it goes.

And what if this Mark were Mark Spitz, the American Olympic swimmer who won seven gold medals in the 1972 Olympics in Munich? What would Mark Spitz have been thinking as he was watching Michael Phelps on television during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing? It’s hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have been making scads of analogies. Not surprisingly, in an interview, Mark Spitz said, “Phelps is pretty much my double. He reminds me of myself.”

And what if Michael Phelps were Jewish (as is Spitz), and if he had grown up in the town of Sacramento (as Spitz did)? Well, the analogical link between him and Spitz would have been all the stronger, and that would have made the experience even more
intense for Spitz. On the other hand, if the sensational athlete in Beijing had been a
woman
who had a chance at winning eight gold medals, the analogy would have been less compelling to the mind of male swimmer Mark Spitz. And if this woman had been Indonesian and if she was shooting for eight gold medals not in swimming but in archery, then Mark Spitz might well have had little or no interest in her quest.

Now why have we taken the trouble to dream up a long set of variations on the theme of Mark Spitz who, at the age of 58, is watching his 23-year-old quasi-double Michael Phelps on television? Our goal was merely to point out once again that human minds are constantly swimming in a sea of comparisons that mostly go unnoticed, and which are all mini-analogies whose experienced intensity is a function of the strength of the analogy. It’s a simple connection: the tighter the analogy, the more strongly it tugs. And what earthly purpose does this nonstop deluge of analogies serve? The flood of analogies sweeping through our brains at all moments is part and parcel of the human condition, and they are manufactured because their presence helps us to put our finger on the essence of the new situations that we confront. Our insatiable compulsion to make comparisons between the brand-new and the previously seen is a necessary prerequisite for staying afloat in a world that is so complex and unpredictable.

Let’s take one last look at the Phelps/Spitz comparison. If this analogy were really all that pointless and vacuous, why would Mark Spitz be thinking about it at all? Why would he be glued to his TV in order to see what will happen to his quasi-double? Why would he say with some nostalgia, “Back in 1972, they didn’t have a 50-meter race as they do now; if it had existed back then, I would probably have won eight gold medals”? And why would journalists from all over the world have gone into a feeding frenzy comparing in great detail the performances of the two Olympians, day after day? Every time someone makes a comparison, no matter how simple-minded or trivial it is, one feels compelled either to reject it or to deepen it. Analogies are addictive!

It might be objected that the comparison “Michael Phelps is like Mark Spitz” does not belong to the same family as the analogies listed in our pyramid of analogies at this chapter’s start (“a song is like a drug”; “sexism is like racism”; “dying is like parting”; “wings are like fins”; “an animal’s heart is like a pump”; and so forth). Those in the pyramid would be
genuine
analogies because each of them reveals something new and unsuspected when one runs into it, whereas “Michael Phelps is like Mark Spitz” is merely the flattest, most anemic of resemblances, having no interest or consequences, almost as if someone said to a friend, “I’m analogous to you, because we both have a head, two arms, and two legs.”

Well, yes — that is, in fact, quite a fine analogy between two people, which, no matter how trivial it may be, can still be perfectly useful. For example, if your ankle is giving you some trouble, and I have already had some ankle problems myself, my advice might be helpful to you. Or if you don’t know how to get an eyelash out of your eye and I have a very reliable trick involving pulling my eyelid down over my eye with
my finger, I could teach you that trick and save you some suffering. Or even simpler: If we’ve just taken a hike together and I’m feeling ravenous, I might well suspect that you’re hungry too.

Analogies far simpler than “Michael Phelps is like Mark Spitz” — extremely banal analogies like “I am like you” or “this human being is like other human beings” — pervade our thoughts. At all moments, we depend intimately on such analogies, though in an entirely unconscious fashion. Thus, we see someone in the New York subway take out at a map of New York, unfold it, and study it; we relate, because we, too, have taken out, unfolded, and studied maps of New York (and of Paris and Madrid and Tokyo…; and guide books, and instruction manuals…) hundreds of times. We see someone scratch her elbow; we relate, because we, too, have scratched our elbow (and our knee, and our neck…), thousands of times. We see someone yawn; we relate, because we, too, have yawned tens of thousands of times. These kinds of analogies are certainly not deeply insightful, but they are nonetheless deep, because they lie at the roots of our understanding of other beings — it would be no exaggeration to describe them as the cornerstones of compassion and empathy — and because they determine our style of relating to the world.

Let’s think about the very down-to-earth analogies that link one grocery store to another. The concept
grocery store
carries a great deal of knowledge within it, such as where bananas are likely to be found. Such knowledge is acquired through the making of analogies and, when needed, it is triggered by analogy. When we say to ourselves, “The bananas ought to be somewhere over there”, the word “there” designates certain familiar aisles in certain familiar grocery stores, yet at the same time it also designates some never-before-seen aisles in the unfamiliar grocery store in which one finds oneself for the first time. If I know where to find the bananas in my usual grocery store, then a “bananalogy” will no doubt help me to find bananas in an unfamiliar grocery store, even one in a foreign country. To be sure, this idea is so lackluster that it hardly feels like an analogy, let alone like a thought of interest or consequence. And yet, for all its lack of luster, it is useful in helping me guess where I can find bananas in a new store.

A crucial aspect of categorization is that it allows us, through analogies that we note, to make guesses or to draw conclusions. These analogies, whatever domain they are in, are based on very familiar categories, such as
person, swimmer, athlete, Olympic champion, swimming legend, grocery store, aisle, banana
, and so on. Without such categories, all thought would come to a crashing halt. Indeed, everyone, at every moment, is betting their very life on the validity of an enormous number of trivial, unconscious analogies whose existence they never suspect at all. Every act of thinking, no matter how small, relies on such analogies, and the tighter the analogy, the more unavoidable the conclusions it leads to would seem to be.

George has just heard the sad news that his best friend’s father has died of a heart attack. Reflexively, he recalls the unexpected death of his own father several years
earlier. And again involuntarily, the recent sudden death of the woman who lived on the same floor of his apartment building flashes to mind. He recalls the time six years earlier, when he himself had to be taken to the emergency room because he was experiencing irregular heartbeats. He recalls the only time when he saw his best friend weeping, and how much that sight had moved him. He remembers how profoundly the death of an old aunt had devastated her husband, and he tries to put himself in the place of his friend’s mother at this terrible time… In short, a flurry of analogies comes rushing helter-skelter into George’s head.

That evening, George calls up his thesis advisor and says, “My best friend’s father died last night, and I’m going to have to be away for a few days for the funeral.” His advisor wistfully replies, “Ah, I understand… You know, our old cat died last week. My wife and I are very sad.” This is yet another analogy, and you might well find it in bad taste — and yet if
your
cat, a cat you’d had for nearly twenty years, had just died, and if someone had phoned you to tell you that a close friend of theirs had just died, wouldn’t your cat’s demise inevitably spring to mind? Sensitivity to the other person’s feelings would almost certainly keep you from mentioning it, but it would not prevent such remindings from occurring silently in the privacy of your head. Moreover, this whole paragraph is tacitly relying on yet another analogy — namely, the comparison between how
you
would act in this situation and how George’s thesis advisor acted. Although that comparison is just a routine, mundane act of alignment, it is nonetheless important to you, because it’s helping you figure out how you feel about a situation you’ve just encountered. Are analogies not, indeed, irresistible and unsuppressible?

In a very large exotic airport at four in the morning when it’s swelteringly hot and you’re hemmed in by several hundred noisy people who, all anxious to get through customs (or better yet, to sneak through) as fast as possible, have established mysteriously fluid line-like filaments that go way beyond the boundaries of the familiar category labeled “line”, and in which people left and right are cutting in and elbowing others, and in which quite a few people can be seen heading down passages that look illegal (hard to say where they go), and where you don’t know a single word of the language (or are there several languages here?), and where you have in your three suitcases (one of which hasn’t yet shown up despite over an hour’s wait, and another of which arrived without its handle, and the third of which lost one of its wheels) a wide variety of quite valuable objects — well, in this unfamiliar situation, it won’t be so easy to lean on one’s rich and usually trustworthy repertoire of familiar and comforting categories as one tries to decide how to behave among all these elbowers, line-cutters, and customs agents!

What is the conceptually closest situation from your past, and at what level of detail? How do you strip this complex situation down to its most essential details to see right to its heart, in the way that a local would do effortlessly? For natives, knowing what to do in this situation is the most natural thing in the world; they’re at home, and it’s simple. For a visiting traveler, though, even if this scenario were to evoke a few situations that have been experienced first-hand, it probably wouldn’t bring to mind any category that would seem very promising and thus very comforting — no helpful
haven of a memory would spring to mind. In this kind of situation, one has to be satisfied with behaviors suggested by memories that are less strongly analogous and which, for that reason, cannot give such precise and reliable tips. It’s too bad, but this, too, is a frequent part of life.