I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (3 page)

Having seen numerous accolades delivered to metaphors, I consider it a treat to see kudos occasionally tossed in the direction of this less heralded figure of speech. In 2006, the popular syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick wrote of the simile:

 

It's the most familiar of all literary enbellishments,
in a class with a wedge of lemon or a sprig of parsley.
It can raise a cupcake to the level of a
petit four
.

 

Lovely as Kilpatrick's thought is, it would be wrong to view the simile as a mere garnish or an ornament to thought. As all language lovers know, similes can be intellectually nourishing as well as tasty. And when similes and metaphors are seamlessly interwoven—as they often are—we are treated to language that is enlivened and ideas that are brought to life:

 

Society is like a stew.
If you don't stir it up every once in a while,
then a layer of scum floats to the top.

EDWARD ABBEY

We can think of history as a kind of layer cake
in which a number of different layers run side by side through time,
each with a dynamic of its own, and yet each from time
to time profoundly penetrating and interacting with others.

KENNETH E. BOULDING

Men resemble great deserted palaces:
the owner occupies only a few rooms
and has closed-off wings where he never ventures.

FRANÇOIS MAURIAC

We could go on and on about these three superstars of figurative lan
guage, and even explore some of their close relatives—like
personification, allegory, fable,
and
parable
—but it's time to bring this introductory chapter to a close. Before we do, let's review where we've come so far. We began by talking about how the prose we read and hear on a regular basis is stale, dull, and uninspired. However, when writers and orators consciously employ a variety of linguistic tools that have been well known for three thousand years, prose can be elevated to such a degree it rivals the grace and beauty of poetry. Of the many stylistic devices that are available, we have focused on the Big Three—analogies, metaphors, and similes.

The rest of the book is a compilation of nearly two thousand quotations, all formed by the use of analogies, metaphors, and similes. The book is organized into topics—like
politics
,
sports
,
sex
, and
love
—but I've decided to give each chapter a metaphorical title.

Some titles—like “Sports Is the Toy Department of Life”—clearly indicate the subject of the chapter. Other titles are not so obvious. The very next chapter—the most personal in the book—is titled “An Ice-Axe for the Frozen Sea Within.” The meaning of the title will become clear to you shortly, but I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that the metaphor—from Franz Kafka—may forever alter the way you look at your book-reading efforts. The table of contents at the beginning of the book provides all the chapter titles as well as the subject area of each one.

In each chapter, I'll begin by introducing the subject in a way that I hope will whet your interest. After a few foundation-laying pages, I'll present a wide variety of quotations that fit within the theme of the chapter. In every chapter except one—which I'll explain when you get there—the quotations will be arranged alphabetically by author. If you want to locate observations from a particular person, consult the Author Index.

Throughout the book, you will occasionally find brief
commentary
after a quotation. In general, this will be my attempt to explain an observation, tell you something about the author, or provide some other information to enhance your appreciation of the quotation.

This book is aimed at readers who have a deep interest in seeing language
used in creative ways. It should also appeal to readers with a professional interest in language and the effective presentation of ideas: writers, poets, journalists, speakers, preachers, speechwriters, and teachers, especially those who teach writing, poetry, and public speaking.

In his 1625 classic
Essays
, the great English man of letters Francis Bacon wrote:

 

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed,
and some few to be chewed and digested.

 

I'm not exactly sure where this book belongs in Bacon's scheme of things, but I do know one thing for sure about how to approach this book.
Go slowly.
Like a museum curator putting together a special art exhibition, I have attempted to compile some of history's greatest
word paintings
. So, just as you would be ill advised to rush through an art museum, it would be a mistake to speed-read your way through this book. Take the time to savor the observations and to admire the skill that was required to create them.

Professionally, I've been a psychologist for over thirty years. Personally, I'm a voracious reader and a serious quotation collector. Just as some people collect coins, or stamps, or butterflies, I collect quotations. I've been doing it for more than four decades, and I now have hundreds of thousands of specimens in my personal collection.

This is my fourth book in the
word and language
arena and like the previous ones, it has been a labor of love. But the process of writing a book is always more fun at the beginning and middle stages than at the end. For the past six weeks, with a production deadline staring me in the face, the project has consumed my life. Winston Churchill described the process best, and he did it metaphorically:

 

Writing a book is an adventure.
To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement;
then it becomes a mistress,
and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant.
The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your
servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.

 

Before I fling this monster in your direction, let me add one more thing. While I've been committed to accuracy, I'm sure I've made some mistakes. If you discover any errors or would simply like to offer some feedback, please write me in care of the publisher or e-mail me at [email protected] com.

I've also launched a Web site where you can delve into the topic a bit deeper or sign up for my free weekly e-newsletter (“Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week”). Come up and visit sometime: www.MetaphorAmor.com.

I
t was early winter, 1962, and I was in the middle of my junior year at the University of North Dakota. A charismatic American president with a grand vision had been in office for nearly two years, and a movement for racial equality, led by an eloquent Southern preacher with an equally grand vision, was beginning to take root all over the country.

I was not tuned into these developments, though, for my priorities lay elsewhere. I was president of my fraternity, vice-president of the student senate, a member of the prestigious Blue Key service fraternity, and an officer of Golden Feather, a highly selective pep club that had the enviable task of selecting cheerleaders for the school's athletic teams. I was, to use a popular expression of the era, a
Big Man on Campus
(BMOC). From the outside, I seemed to be leading a full and exciting life. On the inside, I felt cold and empty.

To the extent I had thought it out—which, in truth, was not very much—I had hoped my extracurricular activities would bring me happiness and satisfaction. But instead of feeling good about my accomplishments and better
about myself, I was discovering that the path I'd been walking down was not taking me to a place where I wanted to go.

I'm not exactly sure what precipitated the decision, but somewhere in the middle of the school year, I impulsively—and, in hindsight, ungracefully—resigned from almost all the groups that up to that point had been so important to me. My fraternity brothers and quite a few other people viewed my decision as a personal rejection, and for a time I was
persona non grata
with many former friends. Feeling alone and afraid, I took a small room in the basement of an off-campus apartment and began a program of intense reading and reflection. With the help of several people who agreed to serve as guides, I began reading as much as I could from a dozen or so writers, including Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a newcomer on the intellectual scene, the 1960 winner of the Nobel Prize, Albert Camus.

Reading
Walden
for the first time, I was struck by the parallel between my recent personal choices and Thoreau's decision to “live deliberately” and “to front only the essential facts of life.” I resonated deeply to his essential goal:

 

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.

 

Life, of course, doesn't have marrow; bones do. But Thoreau was writing figuratively, not literally. And by crafting his words in this way, he created an unforgettable image. Reading Thoreau for the first time, I felt as if I had made a new friend.

I embarked on my reading program with enthusiasm, but it was far from a systematic effort. Like the proverbial child in a candy store, I jumped from one treat to another, sampling something from one writer, and then another, and then another. Early in my efforts, an observation from Albert Camus almost seemed to leap off the pages:

 

One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it.

 

The words had an unexpected impact, softening some of the self-criticism I had been feeling for making what seemed like poor choices. But perhaps I hadn't been so foolish after all. Maybe Camus was right—we best discover what is right for us only after chasing what is wrong. In
Sand and Foam
, Kahlil Gibran expressed the thought in a slightly different way:

 

One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.

 

A short while later, returning to the writings of Thoreau, I was struck by an 1853 entry he made in his journal:

 

Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.

 

By relating human lives to the course of a river, Thoreau was suggesting we follow our natural inclinations. Yes, Shakespeare had said pretty much the same thing in “To thine own self be true,” but that line had already become a cliché. The Thoreau observation, on the other hand, seemed new and special. As his words reverberated in my mind, it was becoming clear that I had indeed made a mistake—but recalling the earlier Camus observation, an honest mistake—by trying to walk down a path better designed for another.

A short while later, I felt a similar emotional stirring when I came across an observation attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson:

 

Do not go where the path may lead,
go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

 

And then again, when—for the first time—I came across this classic passage from Robert Frost's 1916 poem
The Road Not Taken
:

 

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The ideas embedded in these observations seemed so important and profound that I jotted them down on those 3 × 5 index cards that were used back then for library research. Once they were recorded, I thumb-tacked the cards on the walls of my room. As the weeks passed I found myself going back to the quotations again and again for reinforcement and re-inspiration.

As my reading program progressed, I continued this simple recording ritual. After a few months, my dingy little basement room came alive, looking almost as if it had been plastered with a special kind of quotation wallpaper. Thoreau was well represented on my Wall of Quotes:

 

We are all sculptors and painters,
and our material is our own flesh and bones.

 

Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you,
opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

 

As was Ralph Waldo Emerson:

 

Hitch your wagon to a star.

 

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine,
until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

 

and Albert Camus:

 

There is no sun without shadow,
and it is essential to know the night.

 

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that
within me there lay an invincible summer.

 

As much as any quotation on my wall, this last observation from Camus
described what had been happening to me. My investment in a reflective reading program was paying unexpectedly large—and largely unexpected—dividends. A few months earlier, I was in the depths of a dark winter. Now, however, I was beginning to break through to a deeper level of understanding about myself and what I needed to do with my life.

Years later, I would come across an observation that captured what I had been experiencing. In a 1904 letter to a friend, Franz Kafka asked a provocative rhetorical—and metaphorical—question: “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?” And then he answered the question this way:

 

A book should serve as an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.

 

For the remainder of my college years, I read voraciously. My grades suffered, as did many personal relationships, but I was self-medicating with a drug that appeared to hold great promise. Unlike the street drugs that were beginning to become popular, the substance I was using was legal, free for the taking, and capable of unrivaled mind-expanding effects. Another metaphorical observation, this one from Rudyard Kipling—and also discovered many years later—expressed it perfectly:

 

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

 

It's now been more than four decades since I graduated from college, and I'm still addicted—although these days I simply describe myself as an avid quotation collector. In the same way other people collect coins, or stamps, or butterflies, I collect quotations. It is a passion that will continue for the remainder of my life.

At the end of my college years, I dismantled my Wall of Quotes and secured them in a manila folder that I labeled
Words to Live By
. As the years passed, the folder became so bloated with new discoveries that I had to use large rubber bands to keep everything together. After a decade or so, the
folder and its contents became so tattered and worn that I transferred all the quotations into a computer file designated by the initials
WTLB
. Since then, my regimen has been pretty much the same. Whenever I find a particularly inspiring quotation in a book or article, I make a notation in the margin. Later, when I've finished the reading, I record those observations in the
WTLB
file on my computer.

All the specimens in my
Words to Live By
file have inspired or challenged me in some important way. And while many of the quotations are examples of other favorite literary devices—like chiasmus and paradox—a significant number of them, just like the quotations that have appeared so far in this chapter, are analogies, metaphors, and similes. In the remainder of the chapter, I've selected many more that have helped me become a better person; perhaps they will be of some benefit to you as well.

 

I don't want to get to the end of my life
and find that I have lived just the length of it.
I want to have lived the width of it as well.

DIANE ACKERMAN

Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.

MORTIMER ADLER

Words are the physicians of a mind diseased.

AESCHYLUS

Without passion, man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint
which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.

HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL

Passion is a good thing only as long as we realize that too much of a good thing is bad. Ben Franklin advised: “If passion drives, let reason hold the reins.”

 

Such as are your habitual thoughts,
such also will be the character of your mind;
for the soul is dyed by the color of the thoughts.

MARCUS AURELIUS

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers,
it shows he is a citizen of the world,
and that his heart is no island cut off from other islands,
but a continent that joins to them.

FRANCIS BACON

This topographical metaphor, from Bacon's
Essays
(1597), may have inspired one of literature's most famous passages, John Donne's 1624 “No man is an island” sentiment.

 

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Thomas Jefferson observed similarly: “Do not bite the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it.”

 

You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are;
but you must approach each man by the right door.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge,
fitter to bruise than polish.

ANNE BRADSTREET

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant:
if we did not sometimes taste of adversity,
prosperity would not be so welcome.

ANNE BRADSTREET

These two observations come from
Meditations Divine and Moral
(1664), the only prose work from Anne Bradstreet, the first published poet (of either gender) in the American colonies. She wrote the book for her son Simon, writing in the dedication: “You once desired me to leave something for you in writing that you might look upon when you should see me no more.” Even though
Meditations
was written nearly 350 years ago, it can be read with great pleasure and much benefit today.

 

Light tomorrow with today.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.

ROBERT BROWNING

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

PEARL S. BUCK

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal
with the intent of throwing it at someone else;
you are the one who gets burned.

SIDDHARTHA GAUTAMA BUDDHA

When a person is down in the world,
an ounce of help is better than a pound of preaching.

EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism;
never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

CHARLES BUXTON

We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned,
so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL

What we become depends on what we read
after all of the professors have finished with us.
The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

THOMAS CARLYLE

Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with.
Wear your learning like your watch, in a private pocket;
do not pull it out and strike it merely to show you have one.

LORD CHESTERFIELD
(Philip Dormer Stanhope)

Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.

FREDERIC CHOPIN

It is better to wear out than to rust out.
There will be time enough for repose in the grave.

RICHARD CUMBERLAND

This observation—likening human life to a machine—has a contemporary feel but goes back over three centuries. Cumberland was a seventeenth-century English theologian. The saying was attributed to him in a 1786 sermon by a fellow Anglican clergyman, George Horne. Theodore Roosevelt reprised the sentiment in an 1898 speech: “Let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.”