I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (5 page)

Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die copies?

EDWARD YOUNG

This extraordinary line comes from Young's
Conjectures on Original Compositions
(1759). After reading it for the first time, I formulated a new motto: “You were born an original, so don't die a copy.” A century after Young wrote his words, Alexis de Tocqueville carried the metaphor further: “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.”

 

However vague they are, dreams have a way of concealing themselves
and leave us no peace until they are translated into reality,
like seeds germinating underground,
sure to sprout in their search for the sunlight.

LIN YUTANG

I
n 121 A.D., the man the world has come to know as Marcus Aurelius was born into one of the most powerful families in the Roman Empire. The young Marcus was so precocious that he aroused the attention of the emperor Hadrian. He was soon on a fast track to Roman leadership and, at age ten, was being educated by Rome's best thinkers. By age eleven, the ruler-in-training was describing himself as a follower of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus.

Shortly after becoming emperor at age forty, Marcus was the realization of a dream Plato once had—that a philosopher-king would one day rule the empire. Over the next two decades, though, his record didn't quite live up to the hype. Ever since, historians have tried to reconcile his high-minded principles with his actual accomplishments.

In the last ten years of his reign, Marcus kept a personal journal in which he recorded his personal reflections. The diary, never intended for publication, was discovered after his death at age fifty-nine and was eventually published under the simple title
Meditations
. It went on to become one of antiquity's most influential books. As a result of
Meditations
, more is known
about the inner thoughts of this one Roman emperor than all the other emperors combined.

During Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, he was asked to name one book—other than the Bible—that had helped him most. When he cited the
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
, it sparked my interest. As I began to peruse the book, one observation got my attention:

 

The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing;
the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unforeseen attack.

 

In this observation, we see what may be a shift in Marcus's thinking as he has grown older. At an earlier stage of life, the privileged young man might easily have taken the view that life was like dancing—an affair where things go well if one only learns the necessary steps and keeps in time with the music. As emperor, though, he reigned over a country that was threatened by barbarians outside the gate and many political enemies within. The mature Aurelius replaced a dancing metaphor with a wrestling one.

The
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
, even in translations that go back a century, have a distinctly modern feel. Dipping into almost any page of the work, one finds observations that would not be out of place in a modern self-help manual, such as “Our life is what our thoughts make it.” There are also many metaphorical observations:

 

What is not good for the hive is not good for the bee.

 

Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break;
it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.

 

When reflecting on the human condition, philosophically inclined people have always been drawn to metaphorical thinking. Notice what happens when Leo Tolstoy likens the human capacity for self-delusion to a mathematical fraction:

 

A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is
and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself.
The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.

 

For anybody with a basic understanding of mathematics, this is a brilliant way of describing something we all know but have trouble putting into words—the more people inflate themselves, the smaller they become.

Also writing on the subject of man and the phenomenon of self-evaluation, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., wrote in his 1891 book
Over the Teacups
:

 

A man is a kind of inverted thermometer, the bulb uppermost,
and the column of self-valuation is all the time going up and down.

 

Like so many good metaphors, this one is hard to get out of one's mind once it is first read. The bulb, it should be clear, is a person's head, and the different temperature readings reflect the varying self-concept assessments, which change—often markedly—from day to day and season to season. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson, though, who offered the most inspired metaphorical thought on the subject of temperatures and human beings:

 

We boil at different degrees.

 

Metaphorical language has also proved invaluable in helping people cope with tragedies. In 1945, a New Jersey couple on the periphery of Albert Einstein's life experienced one of the great human sorrows—the death of their child. More than four decades earlier, in 1902, the twenty-two-year-old Einstein had experienced the same loss. At the time, while working as a clerk in a Swiss patent office, he was informed by his girlfriend and eventual wife, Mileva, that she was pregnant. The prospect of an illegitimate child was not likely to enhance the young man's career prospects, so the couple decided to register with an adoption agency. Shortly after the birth, though, the baby died of scarlet fever. The event left the new parents deeply shaken.
Einstein's 1945 note to the grieving parents suggests a deep familiarity with the emotions they were likely to be experiencing:

 

When the expected course of everyday life is interrupted,
we realize that we are like shipwrecked people
trying to keep their balance on a miserable plank in the open sea,
having forgotten where they came from
and not knowing whither they are drifting.

 

Einstein had a lot on his plate in those days, so he might have simply penned a brief note of condolence. But he took the time to craft a message that reflected the emotional state of people who've suffered a great loss—the helpless feeling of being adrift.

When people try to communicate deeply personal experiences, it can be difficult. After all, such experiences are—well—deeply personal. In a 1960 article in the
Ladies' Home Journal
, opera singer Marian Anderson described what life was like for a black woman in a white world. Two decades earlier, the internationally acclaimed contralto had been denied permission to sing in Washington's Constitution Hall. Undeterred, she decided to give an outdoor concert at the Lincoln Memorial. More than 75,000 people showed up, providing support for Anderson and showing contempt for the racist policy that had tried to silence her. In the article, she chose a fascinating way to describe racial prejudice:

 

Sometimes, it's like a hair across your cheek.
You can't see it, you can't find it with your fingers,
but you keep brushing at it because the feel of it is irritating.

 

In this personal and poignant reflection, Anderson found a beautiful way to describe one of the uglier aspects of life. It was also a perfect way for the singer to connect her experience with the
Journal's
mainly female readers, all of whom could relate to the analogy of a hair across the face.

Prejudice—whether based on religion, race, gender, class, or anything else—is one of the most troublesome weeds in the garden of human life and will in all likelihood never be completely eliminated. The essential nature of the affliction—and the difficulty involved in overcoming it—was captured in a passage in Charlotte Brontë's 1847 classic,
Jane Eyre:

 

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart
whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education;
they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.

 

Another great theme in human history has been the short-sighted pursuit of practices that are not in our long-term best interest. Whether it has to do with smoking, eating, drinking, or a wide variety of other behaviors, countless people live every day as if the principle of accountability did not apply to them. Norman Cousins, aware of this flaw in the human character, wrote, “Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.” And then he added:

 

A human being fashions his consequences
as surely as he fashions his goods or his dwelling.
Nothing that he says, thinks, or does is without consequences.

 

Writing a century before Cousins, Robert Louis Stevenson—as adept at penning pithy aphorisms as he was at writing adventure stories—said it even better:

 

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

 

Throughout history, analogies, metaphors, and similes have been extremely helpful when people have tried to describe life's drama and adventure, its joy and tragedy, and even its dark and seamy side. In the remainder of the chapter, let's continue our figurative foray into the human condition.

 

When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him,
he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.

CHINUA ACHEBE

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self,
a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.

HENRY BROOKS ADAMS

Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress.
Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

MAYA ANGELOU

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, and didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly;
more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet,
than on the most memorable battlefields in history.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Adversity has the same effect on a man
that severe training has on the pugilist:
it reduces him to his fighting weight.

JOSH BILLINGS
(Henry Wheeler Shaw)

In the 1860s, Shaw adopted the pen name Josh Billings and became famous for his cracker-barrel philosophy and aphorisms written in a phonetic dialect (he called them “affurisms”). Mark Twain was a fan, and once even compared Billings to Ben Franklin. In an 1851 speech, William Cullen Bryant said similarly: “Difficulty…is the nurse of greatness—a
harsh nurse, who roughly rocks her foster-children into strength and athletic proportion.”

 

Mountains appear more lofty the nearer they are approached,
but great men resemble them not in this particular.

MARGUERITE BLESSINGTON

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff
and building your wings on the way down.

RAY BRADBURY

Prejudice is the psoriasis of the human condition:
it's unsightly and it never completely vanishes,
but with a little care we can keep it under control.

RICK BAYAN

Every person's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures
or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of that person.

SAMUEL BUTLER

If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom,
then the emotions…are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.

RACHEL CARSON

No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly;
and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas,
any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.

NICOLAS CHAMFORT

Alcohol is like love: the first kiss is magic,
the second is intimate, the third is routine.
After that you just take the girl's clothes off.

RAYMOND CHANDLER

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

LORD CHESTERFIELD
(Philip Dormer Stanhope)

We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self.

CYRIL CONNOLLY

Men deal with life as children with their play,
Who first misuse, then cast their toys away.

WILLIAM COWPER

There are some people who leave impressions
not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water.

KATE CHOPIN

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary.

It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body.
It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

WINSTON CHURCHILL

To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship,
which illumine only the track it has passed.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

In a related observation, W. R. Inge wrote, “Experience is a good teacher, but her fees are very high.”

 

Common men pass treasures by;
they respond to the spectacle of nature
as guests at a banquet who are neither hungry nor thirsty.

EUGÈNE DELACROIX

What is man, when you come to think upon him,
but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning,
with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?

ISAK DINESEN
(Karen Blixen)

Along the same lines, Christopher Morley once penned this thought: “A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.”

 

Trying to predict the future is like
trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights
while looking out the back window.

PETER DRUCKER

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us
which would have to be taken into account
in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

GEORGE ELIOT

This comes from Eliot's 1876 novel
Daniel Deronda
. Blaise Pascal communicated the same notion more than two centuries earlier when he wrote, “The heart has reasons that the reason knows not of.” The point of both observations is that the motivation behind much of our behavior—especially our occasional outbursts and eruptions—is beyond our conscious awareness.