I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (16 page)

 

What magic there is in a girl's smile. It is the raisin which,
dropped in the yeast of male complacency, induces fermentation.

P. G. WODEHOUSE

I
n his 1995 novel
Corelli's Mandolin
, Louis de Bernieres tells the story of Pelagia Iannis, a young beauty who lives with her physician father on the small Greek island of Cephalonia. When the island is overtaken by Italian troops in the early days of World War II, Dr. Iannis and his daughter are forced to billet the officer in command, Captain Antonio Corelli, in their house. Corelli is a handsome and cultured man who always travels with his prized mandolin. His passion for music is matched by a disdain for military life, which he demonstrates by replying “Heil Puccini” whenever he is offered the Nazi greeting “Heil Hitler.” The beautiful Pelagia soon falls for Corelli, even though she is betrothed to a young Greek fisherman who has left to fight in the war. The developing love affair gravely concerns her father, who sits her down one day and says:

 

Love is a kind of dementia
with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms.

 

After ticking off some of the “symptoms” that he has observed in the young lovers, Dr. Iannis launches into an extended analogy. I was captivated when I first read the passage, and I hope you will enjoy it as well:

 

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides.
And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out
whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable
that you should ever part. Because this is what love is.
Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement,
it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not
the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake
at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body….
That is just being “in love,” which any fool can do.
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away,
and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it,
we had roots that grew towards each other underground,
and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches,
we found that we were one tree and not two.

 

In the first portion of the passage, Dr. Iannis offers one of history's oldest metaphors:
love is mental illness
. Plato may have been the first to express it:

 

Love is a grave mental disease.

 

In
As You Like It
, Shakespeare has Rosalind say it this way: “Love is merely a madness.” And over the centuries, many others have echoed the theme:

 

Love,
n
. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal
of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder.

AMBROSE BIERCE

Love is a pardonable insanity.

NICOLAS CHAMFORT

Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that.
It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion….
You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.

MARILYN FRENCH

Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one.
It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it.
It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really
saw
.

FRAN LEBOWITZ

Returning to Dr. Iannis's lecture to his daughter, you will notice that he moves from one metaphor—
love is mental illness
—to another:
love is the intertwining of roots
. Out of the ashes of a passionate love, he argues, a deep-rooted and intertwined love often emerges, turning separate individuals into one entity. It's a beautiful passage and a nice reminder that after the fireworks of the early years, the most important dynamics of love are not obvious but go on beneath the surface. In his 1978 book
Thoughts in a Dry Season
, Gerald Brenan said it this way:

 

Married love is a stream that, after a certain length of time,
sinks into the earth and flows underground.
Something is there, but one does not know what.
Only the vegetation shows that there is still water.

 

In the first century B.C., Ovid was the most popular writer in the Roman Empire. Born into an old and respectable family, the young Ovidius—his formal Latin name—showed early academic promise and was educated by the best teachers of the day. While he showed great potential
as an orator, he turned to writing instead, ultimately focusing on love and amorous intrigue. He described the dynamics of love in such a captivating way that his first book,
Amores
, was devoured by the sophisticated and pleasure-seeking society in which he lived. The book was so popular it was followed by what we now call sequels:
The Art of Love
,
The Art of Beauty
, and
Remedies for Love
. Ovid was married three times, finally finding contentment in his third marriage. But his first two marriages were short-lived and not particularly harmonious, giving special relevance to a line that appeared in
The Art of Love
:

 

Love is a kind of warfare.

 

Ovid carried the metaphor further when he suggested that the wounds of love are as common as the wounds of war—and just as lethal:

 

As many as the shells that are on the shore,
so many are the pains of love;
the darts that wound are steeped in much poison.

 

Ovid was one of the first people in history to say that
love is war,
which rivals
love is mental illness
as the most popular metaphor on the subject. After Ovid, the theme has been pursued by many others:

 

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does.
Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

JAMES BALDWIN

If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.
If you say, “No! I don't want it right now,”
that's when you'll get it for sure.
Love will make a way out of no way.

LYNDA BARRY

Love and war are the same thing, and stratagems
and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other.

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

It is the same in love as in war; a fortress that parleys is half taken.

MARGUERITE DE VALOIS

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

H. L. MENCKEN

In addition to insanity and war,
fire
is another common metaphor for the passion of love. The notion also goes back to ancient times. In the first century B.C. the Roman poet Virgil wrote the
Aeneid
, an epic poem that contains this line:

 

I feel again a spark of that ancient flame.

 

That ancient flame—the flame of love—has been a central theme in world literature. In
The Divine Comedy
, written in the early 1300s, Dante used the metaphor to suggest that a great passion can spring from a modest beginning:

 

A great flame follows a little spark.

 

In the seventeenth century, an English proverb commonly attributed to English cleric Jeremy Taylor continued the theme and became one of history's most popular observations:

 

Love is friendship set on fire.

 

As the centuries passed, scores of writers have continued to compare love to fire. Lord Byron saw love as a kind of celestial fire, calling it “a light
from heaven, a spark of that immortal fire.” Honoré de Balzac wrote that “Love is like the devil,” adding “Whom it has in its clutches it surrounds with flames.” And the Chilean poet and 1971 Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda expressed it this way:

 

To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life.

 

Henry Ward Beecher, one of America's most influential preachers, found the concept helpful in explaining the difference between youthful and mature love:

 

Young love is a flame;
very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering.
The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals,
deep-burning, unquenchable.

 

While the hot and fierce flame of love blazes gloriously, it too often burns out. The phenomenon has been commonly described in literature, but rarely as simply and starkly as in this 1862 passage from Ivan Turgenev's
Fathers and Sons
:

 

But within a month it was all over:
the fire had kindled for the last time and had died for ever.

 

Of all the
love is fire
metaphors in my collection, though, my favorite comes from a woman who is best remembered for her great acting ability and her not-so-great parenting skills. In 1943, actress Joan Crawford was quoted as saying:

 

Love is a fire.
But whether it is going to warm your hearth
or burn down your house, you can never tell.

 

So far, we've seen love likened to mental illness, war, and fire. In the rest of the chapter you'll see many more love metaphors. For centuries, as love has been rhapsodized by the romantics, skewered by the cynics, and demonized by the disillusioned, it has been done with an extraordinary array of analogies, metaphors, and similes. Whatever your views on love, you'll find support for your position, and maybe have your thinking stimulated along the way.

 

Without love our life is…a ship without a rudder.

SHOLEM ALEICHEM

Love is a net that catches hearts like a fish

MUHAMMAD ALI

This appeared in a 2004
Esquire
magazine article titled “What I've Learned.” The piece contains many sayings that Ali did not author (like “Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise”) but that he says have guided his life.

 

Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy.

GORDON W. ALLPORT

Love as a healing force is a tenet of modern psychology. Karl Menninger put it this way: “Love is a medicine for the sickness of the world; a prescription often given, too rarley taken.” Eric Berne added succinctly, “Love is nature's psychotherapy.”

 

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.

MAYA ANGELOU

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.

JEAN ANOUILH

This is from the novel
Ardèle
(1948), where Anouilh also wrote: “Oh, love is real enough; you will find it someday, but it has one arch-enemy—and that is life.”

 

Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart,
as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower,
with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Balzac also wrote, “Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature.”

 

Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke.

LYNDA BARRY

What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Love is the wine of existence

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Beecher, the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
fame, also wrote, “Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.”

 

Memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.

ELIZABETH BOWEN

In this extremely interesting analogy, Bowen suggests that it is the memories of lovers that form the foundation for love.

 

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

When success comes in the door, it seems,
love often goes out the window.

DR. JOYCE BROTHERS

Love doesn't drop on you unexpectedly; you have to give off signals, sort of like an amateur radio operator.

HELEN GURLEY BROWN

Love is the wild card of existence.

RITA MAE BROWN

One of the best things about love—
the feeling of being wrapped, like a gift, in understanding.

ANATOLE BROYARD

As the cat lapses into savagery by night,
and barbarously explores the dark,
so primal and titanic is a woman with the love-madness.

GELETT BURGESS

Once love is purged of vanity,
it resembles a feeble convalescent, hardly able to drag itself about.

NICOLAS CHAMFORT

Love is more pleasant than marriage
for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.

NICOLAS CHAMFORT

Chamfort's point is that novels are fiction and history is reality—and the
fictions surrounding love are more pleasant than the realities surrounding marriage.

 

In love as in art, good technique helps.

MASON COOLEY

Love is an alliance of friendship and of lust:
if the former predominates, it is a passion exalted and refined;
but if the latter, gross and sensual.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Love is a friendship set to music.

E. JOSEPH COSSMAN