I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (21 page)

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Over the centuries, great beauty has charmed otherwise smart people into doing many foolish things. On the same subject, the seventeenth-century English naturalist John Ray offered this thought: “Beauty is power; a smile is its sword.”

 

Sexuality is the great field of battle
between biology and society.

NANCY FRIDAY

It is a crossing of a Rubicon in life history.

PAUL H. GEPHARD,
on one's first sexual intercourse

There may be no more significant event in a person's life than losing one's virginity, and Gephard, director of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, chose an apt metaphor to describe it. The Rubicon is a river that, in ancient times, divided Italy and Gaul. In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar crossed the river in a military march against Pompey. He acted in defiance of the Roman Senate's orders, saying “the die is cast” as he crossed the river. Ever since, “Crossing the Rubicon,” has been a metaphor for taking a step after which there is no turning back.

 

I think that making love is the best form of exercise.

CARY GRANT

So female orgasm…may be thought of as a pleasure prize
that comes with a box of cereal.
It is all to the good if the prize is there
but the cereal is valuable and nourishing if it is not.

MADELINE GRAY

Despite a lifetime of service to the cause of sexual liberation,
I have never caught venereal disease, which makes me feel rather like
an Arctic explorer who has never had frostbite.

GERMAINE GREER

Greer, the Australian author of the feminist classic
The Female Eunuch
(1970), authored two other metaphorical observations of interest:

“A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman's neck.”

“Conventional sexual intercourse is like squirting jam into a doughnut.”

 

Masturbation is the thinking man's television.

CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON

A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Playboy
exploits sex the way
Sports Illustrated
exploits sports.

HUGH HEFNER

Female passion is to masculine as the epic is to an epigram.

KARL KRAUS

Since an epic contains many thousands of words, and an epigram generally fewer than a dozen, it is clear who has the most passion, according to this observation.

 

Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness.

D. H. LAWRENCE

And when beauty fades, problems surface for those who have relied heavily on it. On the fading nature of great looks over time, Joan Collins wrote: “The problem with beauty is that it's like being born rich and getting poorer.”

 

As for the topsy-turvy tangle known as
soixante-neuf
,
personally I have always felt it to be madly confusing,
like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time.

HELEN LAWRENSON

Soixante-neuf
is French for the sexual position known in English as
sixty-nine
.

 

Sex when you're married is like going to a 7-Eleven.
There's not as much variety, but at three in the morning, it's always there.

CAROL LEIFER

I was wondering today what the religion of the country is—
and all I could come up with is sex.

CLARE BOOTH LUCE,
in a 1982 column

She was our angel…and the sugar of sex came up from her
like a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin…a very Stradivarius of sex.

NORMAN MAILER,
on Marilyn Monroe

In the duel of sex, women fight from a dreadnaught,
and man from an open raft.

H. L. MENCKEN

A dreadnaught is a class of battleship that first appeared in 1906. The ship was so technically advanced and, with its huge guns, so deadly that it immediately made all previous battleships obsolete. A raft, by comparison, is pretty a flimsy craft, so it is clear in Mencken's view who has the upper hand in this duel.

 

I love the lines men use to get us into bed.
“Please, I'll only put it in for a minute.”
What am I, a microwave?

BEVERLY MICKINS

The sex organ has a poetic power, like a comet.

JOAN MIRO

Do they still call it infatuation?
That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow…
Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes
the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks…
People with no imagination feed it with sex—the clown of love.

TONI MORRISON,
from her 2003 novel
Love

The kiss is a wordless articulation of desire
whose object lies in the future, and somewhat to the south.

LANCE MORROW

Sex has become the religion of the most civilized portions of the earth.
The orgasm has replaced the cross
as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE

Muggeridge, a controversial English journalist, was a self-proclaimed drinker, smoker, and womanizer who also authored another widely quoted
metaphor: “Sex is the
ersatz
or substitute religion of the twentieth century.” In 1968, after meeting Mother Teresa, he brought her work to an English audience in a television documentary. Meeting her changed him—and the former agnostic shocked many when he wrote
Jesus Rediscovered
in 1969.

 

In sex as in banking there is a penalty for early withdrawal.

CYNTHIA NELMS

I like my sex the way I play basketball:
one-on-one with as little dribbling as possible.

LESLIE NIELSON

Sex—the poor man's polo.

CLIFFORD ODETS

A century earlier, Charles Baudelaire wrote in his journal: “Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.” Both observations were preceded by a centuries-old Italian proverb: “Bed is the poor man's opera.”

 

Sex is power, and all power is inherently aggressive.

CAMILLE PAGLIA

Leaving sex to the feminists
is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.

CAMILLE PAGLIA

What is an orgasm, after all, except laughter of the loins?

MICKEY ROONEY

Sex is like art.
Most of it is pretty bad, and the good stuff is out of your price range.

SCOTT ROEBEN

Sex is currency.
What's the use of being beautiful
if you can't profit from it?

LILI ST. CYR

In the mid-twentieth century, St. Cyr was the best-known striptease dancer in America.

 

The basic conflict between men and women, sexually,
is that men are like firemen. To men, sex is an emergency,
and no matter what we're doing we can be ready in two minutes.
Women, on the other hand, are like fire. They're very exciting,
but the conditions have to be exactly right for it to occur.

JERRY SEINFELD

I've always felt that foreplay should be like a good meal,
going from soup…to nuts.

CYBILL SHEPHERD,
from her 2000 memoir
Cybill Disobedience

Anyone who calls it
sexual intercourse
can't possibly be interested in doing it.
You might as well announce that you're ready for lunch by proclaiming,
“I'd like to do some masticating and enzyme secreting.”

ALLEN SHERMAN

The sexual organs are the most sensitive organs of the human being.
The eye or the ear seldom sabotages you.
An eye will not stop seeing if it doesn't like what it sees.
I would say that the sexual organs express the human soul
more than any other part of the body.
They are not diplomats. They tell the truth ruthlessly.

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

Men tend to be like microwave ovens—
instantly ready to be turned on at anytime, day or night….
The average woman, however, is more like a crock-pot.
She needs to warm up to the sexual experience and savor the process.

GARY SMALLEY

In a related metaphor, actress Sandra Bullock agreed: “Women are like ovens. We need fifteen minutes to heat up.”

 

On the level of simple sensation and mood,
making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as,
if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.

SUSAN SONTAG

In the fifth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Democritus said, “Coition is a slight attack of apoplexy.” Also on the topic of fitful sex, Sontag wrote, “Sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication…but then again may not.”

 

Most men approach sex a lot like shooting a game of pinball.
We don't have any idea about the internal workings
or what we should do to win,
we're just gonna try to keep the ball in play as long as possible.

TIM STEEVES

For guys, sex is like going to a restaurant.
No matter what they order off that menu,
they walk out saying, “Damn! That was good!”
For women, it don't work like that. We go to the restaurant;
sometimes it's good, sometimes you got to send it back….
Or you might go, “I think I'm going to cook for myself today.”

WANDA SYKES

I have observed on board a steamer,
how men and women easily give way to their instinct for flirtation,
because water has the power of washing away our sense of responsibility,
and those who on land resemble the oak in their firmness
behave like floating seaweed when on the sea.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

The Fifties was the most sexually frustrated decade: ten years of foreplay.

LILY TOMLIN

Germaine Greer said the same thing: “The 1950s were ten years of foreplay.” Jerry Rubin, reflecting on the role the automobile played in the process, observed “The back seat produced the sexual revolution.”

 

The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body…
Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes
are as near the human form can ever come to abstract art.

KENNETH TYNAN

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

JOHN UPDIKE

History is filled with the sound of
silken slippers going downstairs
and wooden shoes coming up.

VOLTAIRE

Throughout history, the privileged classes have snuck downstairs at night to have sex with servants or slaves—and sometimes those same servants and slaves have trekked upstairs for the same purpose.

 

Sex and religion are bordering states.
They use the same vocabulary, share like ecstasies,
and often serve as a substitute for one another.

JESSAMYN WEST

An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promise.

MAE WEST

An orgasm is just a reflex, like a sneeze.

DR. RUTH WESTHEIMER

In the 1980s, Dr. Ruth was the world's most famous sex therapist, and this was her attempt to portray the orgasm as a natural bodily function. Mason Cooley may have been inspired by her when he offered this definition: “Orgasm: the genitals sneezing.” But a decade before Dr. Ruth, the authors of a 1972 sex manual for children had already discovered the value of the sneeze metaphor in explaining the nature of an orgasm to prepubescent children: “An orgasm is like the tickling feeling you get inside your nose before you sneeze.”

 

Sex is the Tabasco sauce which an adolescent national palate
sprinkles on every course in the menu.

MARY DAY WINN

J
ohn Quincy Adams became the sixth president of the United States in 1825, the first son of a president to be elected to the nation's highest office. At the end of the campaign, none of the candidates—which included Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay—had garnered enough electoral votes, and the election was decided in the House of Representatives. When the new President Adams went on to appoint Clay as secretary of state, Jackson cried foul and complained of “a corrupt bargain.” With serious political opposition from the Jacksonians and a weak political base, the Adams presidency was not a happy—or a particularly distinguished—one.

But Adams was an interesting guy. He often began his day by taking a vigorous early morning swim—often in the nude—in the Potomac River. In a famous anecdote, a female journalist once snatched his clothes from the riverbank and returned them only after Adams agreed to give her an interview. He served one term, defeated in 1828 by his old nemesis, Andrew Jackson. He returned to Massachusetts to lick his political wounds
and write his memoirs, but in 1831 he returned to the U. S. Congress, the only former president to do so.

In the middle of an impassioned 1848 speech in Congress, Adams suffered a stroke and fell unconscious to the floor. His health had been failing in recent years, and some previous heart problems had limited him severely. He died two days later, at age eighty.

In a eulogy, Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster recalled his last meeting with the deceased former President. While visiting Adams at his home in D.C., Webster overheard a man ask the aging politician how he was doing. Adam's voice was weak, but his words reflected a mind that was still strong and vibrant:

 

I inhabit a weak, frail, decayed tenement;
battered by the winds and broken in upon by the storms,
and from all I can learn, the landlord does not intend to repair.

 

Webster, one of the great orators of his era, admired eloquence whenever it surfaced, and he was deeply moved by this powerful—and poignant—metaphor. Happily for lovers of language, he recorded Adam's reply for posterity.

Observations about age and aging have appeared with great frequency over the centuries, but until I began work on this book I didn't realize how many of them are metaphorical. Many, like the Adams observation, have come from elderly people contemplating a death that is soon to come. Others have been written by younger people as they begin to imagine death. In 1728, at age twenty-two, Benjamin Franklin began tinkering with a possible epitaph for himself. He went through several possibilities—some serious, some clever—before composing this metaphorical masterpiece:

 

The body of Benjamin Franklin, Printer,
(like the cover of an old book,
its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding),

Lies here, food for worms;
But the work shall not be lost, for it will (as he believed)
appear once more in a new and more elegant edition,
revised and corrected by the Author.

 

Franklin, a printer by trade, was a voracious reader and one of America's first great bibliophiles. When he died in 1790, at age eighty-four, his personal library had grown to more than four thousand volumes, the largest private collection in the colonies. Given Franklin's great love of books, it is not surprising that in his famous epitaph he would liken himself to a worn and weathered volume destined to be improved in a Second Edition.

Franklin returned to the book analogy in his autobiography, which made its first appearance in 1791 (in an unauthorized edition and, amazingly, not in English, but in French). When the first English version appeared a few years later, the very first page of the book featured a reappearance of the theme:

 

If it were left to my choice, I should have no objection
to go over the same life from its beginning to the end:
requesting only the advantage authors have,
of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

 

In the late nineteenth century, Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson was one of the world's most famous writers. Best known as the author of great adventure novels, to literary types he was also an admired essayist. In his most famous collection of essays,
Virginibus Puerisque
(1881), he wrote beautifully on a host of subjects. One observation on aging stands out:

 

For, after a certain distance, every step we take in life
we find the ice growing thinner below our feet,
and all around us
and behind us
we see our contemporaries going through.

 

When I read this for the first time, I had a flashback to something Blaise Pascal once wrote: “Eloquence is a painting of thought.” When a writer paints a verbal masterpiece, as Stevenson does here, the result is an unforgettable
mental picture
that lingers in the mind long after the words have been processed by the brain.

The image of people falling through ice also brings to mind the expression
skating on thin ice
, which has been used since colonial times to refer to the act of placing oneself in a potentially dangerous situation. The actual practice of skating on ice that has not frozen to a safe thickness has always had an allure for thrill-seekers. Ralph Waldo Emerson may have even had this risky activity in mind when he wrote: “In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.”

Some of the most impressive metaphorical observations on aging aren't about death and dying, but about simply getting older. In his 1992 novel
When Nietzsche Wept,
psychotherapist-turned-novelist Irvin D. Yalom weaves a fascinating fictional account of a relationship that develops between Dr. Josef Breuer, a founder of
the talking cure
that became known as psychoanalysis, and a little-known, poverty-stricken, and suicidally depressed young philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche. While working in Vienna in 1882, Breuer is persuaded to take on Nietzsche's case. He agrees to do so, despite a major stumbling block—the young philosopher is far too proud to seek help.

Breuer concocts an ingenious ploy to cure Nietzsche without Nietzsche knowing it—he will pose as a person struggling with his own existential problems, and ask the philosopher for help. Nietzsche, of course, is happy to oblige, and the result is a thoroughly engaging yarn. Breuer's ploy is not a complete ruse, however, for he has just turned forty and is in the middle of a full-blown mid-life crisis. At one point, he looks in a mirror and is dismayed by the sight:

 

He hated the sight of his beard…
He hated also the outcropping of gray that had insidiously appeared

in his mustache, on the left side of his chin, and in his sideburns.
These gray bristles were, he knew,
the advance scouts of a relentless, wintry invasion.
And there would be no stopping the march of the hours, the days, the years.

 

By viewing the emergence of gray hair as the initial foray of an unstoppable army, Breuer experiences the dread that small and vulnerable countries must feel when they are about to be invaded by an invincible enemy. The seventeenth-century poet Thomas Flatman also used a military image to convey this realization:

 

Age…brings along with him
A terrible artillery.

 

As you peruse the observations in this chapter, you will notice that many—even though expressed eloquently—are sad, poignant, or even a little depressing:

 

A man in old age is like a sword in a shop window.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Old age is an island surrounded by death.

JUAN MONTALVO

Old age is an incurable disease.

SENECA

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

But you will also find observations from people who approach age, not
with dread and a sense of foreboding, but with grace and good humor. In Samuel Butler's 1903 novel
The Way of All Flesh
, a character says:

 

There's many a good tune played on an old fiddle.

 

In writing this, Butler may have been influenced by a similar English proverb that was popular at the time. Proverbial wisdom has often celebrated maturity. And in the grand tradition of indirect communication, proverbs often appear to be about other subjects when they are, in fact, observations about age and aging:

 

Just because there's snow on the roof,
it doesn't mean the boiler's gone out.

AMERICAN PROVERB

The older the fiddle, the sweeter the tune.

ENGLISH PROVERB

The oldest trees often bear the sweetest fruit.

GERMAN PROVERB

The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.

SWEDISH PROVERB

Some people have even viewed the mature years as a liberation from the problems associated with youth. In
Fear of Fifty
(1995), Erica Jong wrote:

 

At fifty, the madwoman in the attic breaks loose,
stomps down the stairs, and sets fire to the house.
She won't be imprisoned anymore.

 

And speaking of good-humored observations, the British actress Ger
trude Lawrence described the stages of a woman's life in a spectacular geographical metaphor:

 

From 16 to 22, like Africa—part virgin, part explored;
23 to 35, like Asia—hot and mysterious;
35 to 45, like the USA—high-toned and technical;
46 to 55, like Europe—quite devastated, but interesting in places.

 

Any reasonably complete discussion of age and aging must include descriptions about the youthful years, and you will find many of them in this chapter as well. Perhaps the most famous metaphor about youth comes from Shakespeare's
Antony and Cleopatra
. Cleopatra tries to convince Mark Antony that her love for him is the real thing, and nothing like the youthful and foolish infatuation she had for Julius Caesar. In making her case, she refers to:

 

My salad days, when I was green in judgment.

 

Salad days
is now a universal metaphor for that period between childhood and adulthood when people are inexperienced—or
green
with youth—and not yet ripened into maturity. Today, thanks to Shakespeare, we still use the word
green
to describe a lack of experience.

As people move from the dawn of their lives and get closer to the twilight, thoughts about aging and death become natural and commonplace. And, as we've already seen with observations about life, love, and so many other aspects of the human condition, many of the most compelling thoughts about the ages and stages of life have been expressed metaphorically.

 

Old minds are like old horses;
you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep,
and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.

STEWART ALSOP

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom,
and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL

The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world;
I am like a snowball—the further I am rolled, the more I gain.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY

The timing of death, like the ending of a story,
gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.

MARY CATHERINE BATESON

Youth: The too-brief span wherein
the human chassis is factory fresh, undented, and free of corrosion.

RICK BAYAN

Old age is like climbing a mountain. You climb from ledge to ledge.
The higher you get, the more tired and breathless you become—
but your views become more extensive.

INGRID BERGMAN

As you get older, you find that often the wheat,
disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Separating wheat from the chaff
means to separate the valuable from the useless. In ancient times, winnowing was the process of exposing harvested wheat to the blowing air in order to separate the useless
chaff
from the valu
able kernels. The metaphor became established after a passage in Luke 3:17 described Jesus as using a winnowing fork to gather the wheat (worthy followers) into his granary (heaven), and leaving the chaff (the unworthy) to the fires of hell.

 

Youth is like spring, an overpraised season
—delightful if it happens to be a favored one,
but in practice very rarely favored and more remarkable,
as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes.

SAMUEL BUTLER

As a white candle
In a holy place,
So is the beauty
Of an aged face.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL

This is not from the contemporary mythologist of the same name but from an earlier Irish poet who went on to become an Irish nationalist. The passage comes from one of his most famous poems, “Old Woman,” written in 1913.

 

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

WILLA CATHER

Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough,
as drunken men are apt to think themselves sober enough.

LORD CHESTERFIELD
(Philip Dormer Stanhope)

Old age: the crown of life, our play's last act.