I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like
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because he differs in opinion from you.
It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head
because you differ from yourself ten years ago.
HORACE MANN
For this is the journey that men make: to find themselves.
If they fail in this, it doesn’t much matter what else they find…
and when the tickets are collected at the end of the ride,
they are tossed into a bin marked “Failure.”
But if a man happens to find himself…then he has found a mansion
which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.
JAMES MICHENER
Man’s task is to make of himself a work of art.
HENRY MILLER
Let him who would write heroic poems make his life a heroic poem.
JOHN MILTON
We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.
KENJI MIYAZAWA
It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Montaigne did his writing in a circular room he constructed in the tower of his family chateau. His solitarium, as he called it, contained his books and writing table. He outdid my Wall of Quotes with his Beam of Quotes. On the roof-beams of his room, he hand-carved approximately fifty inspirational quotations, such as Terence’s “I am a man; nothing human is alien to me.”
It’s a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then,
like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
When one has much to put into them, a day has a hundred pockets.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences
(deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats,
even when he has some tough morsels to swallow.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud
was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
ANAÏS NIN
A man’s duty…is to find out where the truth is, or if he cannot, at least
to take the best possible human doctrine and the hardest to disprove,
and to ride on this like a raft over the waters of life.
PLATO
Remember, you are just an extra in everyone else’s play.
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT
It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit;
divorced from it, they remain barren.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Sometimes our light goes out but is blown again into flame
by an encounter with another human being.
Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this inner light.
ALBERT SCHWEITZER
In the late 1700s, the German man of letters Johann Gottfried von Herder offered a related thought: “Without inspiration, the best powers of the mind remain dormant; there is a fuel in us which needs to be ignited with sparks.”
Constant kindness can accomplish much.
As the sun makes ice melt,
kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.
ALBERT SCHWEITZER
Reading is a means of thinking with another person’s mind; it forces you to stretch your own.
CHARLES SCRIBNER, JR.
This is the true joy in life,
the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one;
the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap;
the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod
of ailments and grievances complaining that the world
will not devote itself to making you happy.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
I dread success.
To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth,
like the male spider, who is killed by the female
the moment he has succeeded in his courtship.
I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and one behind.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.
MOTHER TERESA
A mind all logic is like a knife all blade.
It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
He who has more learning than good deeds
is like a tree with many branches but weak roots;
the first great storm will throw it to the ground.
He whose good works are greater than his knowledge
is like a tree with fewer branches but with strong and spreading roots,
a tree which all the winds of heaven cannot uproot.
THE TALMUD
If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
This passage from Walden resulted in the metaphor about marching to the beat of a different drummer, one of history’s most popular sayings, and a reminder to be tolerant of those who shun the crowded path and go their own way.
So behave that the odor of your actions
may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Follow the grain in your own wood.
HOWARD THURMAN
We can’t reach old age by another man’s road.
MARK TWAIN
Twain wrote this in a piece he composed for his seventieth birthday celebration at Manhattan’s Delmonico’s restaurant in 1905.
Shun idleness. It is a rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals.
VOLTAIRE
We must cultivate our garden.
VOLTAIRE
These words come at the end of Voltaire’s 1760 classic, Candide. Replying to a remark from Dr. Pangloss, Candide is referring to his vegetable garden, but he was also speaking metaphorically. In my years as a marriage counselor, I often reminded clients that a relationship is like a garden. And when we cultivate gardens, two things are necessary—nutrients must be added and weeds must be picked.
Feeling gratitude and not expressing it
is like wrapping a present and not giving it.
WILLIAM ARTHUR WARD
On her final day on the Today Show in 2006, Katie Couric used this quotation—without crediting the author—to sum up her feelings toward co-host Matt Lauer and the others she had worked with during her fifteen years on the show.
But beware you be not swallowed up in books!
An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.
JOHN WESLEY, in a 1768 letter to his brother Joseph
There are two ways of spreading light:
to be the candle, or the mirror that reflects it.
EDITH WHARTON
A man’s rootage is more important than his leafage.
WOODROW WILSON
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
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sp; chapter 2
Reserved Seats at a Banquet of Consequences
In 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 h
elpful 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