I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (14 page)

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
in
All's Well That Ends Well

You cannot learn to skate without being ridiculous….
The ice of life is slippery.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another
is the stage of the disease at which he lives.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Life is like a cash register, in that every account,
every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.

FULTON J. SHEEN

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read.

CAROL SHIELDS

Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for awhile and then act our part in it.

JONATHAN SWIFT

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit
being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

JOHN UPDIKE

Life is thick sown with thorns,
and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them.
The longer we dwell on our misfortunes,
the greater is their power to harm us.

VOLTAIRE

Life is a game of whist. From unseen sources
The cards are shuffled, and the hands are dealt.
I do not like the way the cards are shuffled,
But yet I like the game and want to play.

EUGENE F. WARE

Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

EDITH WHARTON

Life is a process of burning oneself out
and time is the fire that burns you.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Williams said this in a 1958 interview. In his 1953 novel
Camino Real
, he had a character offer another thought on the subject: “Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.”

 

Life is a lot like a marathon.
If you can finish a marathon, you can do anything you want.

OPRAH WINFREY

Life is so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

It's a powerful image—and a stark reminder that we're safe only if we can stay on the thin stretch of pavement. The abyss is always there, just beyond the edge.

 

Life is a rainbow which also includes black.

YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO

A
ntoine de Saint-Exupéry was one of twentieth-century Europe's most fascinating figures. Born in 1900 to aristocratic parents who had fallen on hard times, he attended Jesuit schools in Switzerland and France. A poor student as well as a discipline problem, he was drifting through adolescence when he became fascinated with the new world of flight. In 1921, he joined the French Army, and a year later he was commissioned as a pilot in the nation's newly established Air Force. When he finished military service in 1926, he became a commercial pilot, initially flying airmail routes from France to Morocco and West Africa, and eventually to South America. He was also a test pilot for Air France, where his fearlessness made him a legend in his profession.

These days, Saint-Exupéry is best remembered as a writer. In the decades before World War II, he authored several books that celebrated the fancy of flight and the bravery of aviators. After the fall of France in 1940, he fled to the United States, where he produced his two most famous books,
Letter to a Hostage
, a call for French resistance to the Nazis, and the
wildly successful
The Little Prince
, a child's fable for adults. Shortly after both books were published in 1943, he joined the allied forces in North Africa and was presumably killed when his plane crashed at sea in 1944. Saint-Exupéry was a stylish and imaginative writer, penning many spectacular observations. One of my favorites appeared in his 1942 book
Flight to Arras
:

 

Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied.

 

This is a triple threat of a metaphor, immediately provoking a host of visual images and a flurry of associations. The first is about people
tying the knot
, a popular metaphor for marriage. In ancient times, however, it was an actual practice—a priest or family patriarch would symbolize the marital union by tying together the garments of the bride and groom. We can easily pursue the metaphor further:

We could take the same approach with the
web
and
mesh
metaphors. Reflecting on the interpersonal world, a
web of relationships
seems an appropriate way to describe one of life's most persistent realities—we are most deeply affected by people who are close to us, but are often keenly aware of things that happen to those on the outskirts of our lives. While
mesh
is a word that is used infrequently, almost everyone is familiar with what happens when the gears of a machine—or the personalities of two people—don't mesh. And in my mind, the popular psychological concept of being
enmeshed
always evokes the image of a fish snared in the mesh of a fishing
net (technically, the term means being entangled or hopelessly caught up in a relationship or other vexing situation).

When people create metaphors, they find similarities between things that, on the surface, are dissimilar. A good metaphor is like a bridge that links two territories that have been separated by a body of water or a deep canyon. Once the bridge is connected, people can travel freely back and forth. In her 1982 book
Anatomy of Freedom,
Robin Morgan expressed it this way:

 

Metaphor is the energy charge that leaps between images,
revealing their connections.

 

While many relationship metaphors are serious, others are comedic. In the 1977 film
Annie Hall
, Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) says to Annie (Diane Keaton):

 

A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know?
It has to constantly move forward or it dies.
And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.

 

The line never fails to elicit a laugh, no matter how many times the film is viewed. But it also never fails to provoke a thought, cleverly reminding us that relationships which stand still often fail to survive.

Of all human relationships, those between men and women have probably received the most attention—and they have definitely inspired the most memorable observations. One of the most famous is this analogy:

 

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

 

The point, of course, is that women don't need men at all. The saying is usually attributed to Gloria Steinem, and sometimes to lawyer Florynce Kennedy, both of whom used it frequently in the 1970s. The
feminist slogan
, as it is often called, has always been familiar to baby-boomers, but it was
brought to a whole new generation when it showed up in the 1991 U2 song
Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World
. While Steinem and Kennedy have gone to great lengths to deny authorship, attributions to them continue to the present day. Steinem once even wrote a letter to
Time
magazine to identify the woman who first said it: an Australian writer, filmmaker, and former politician named Irina Dunn.

As the news of Dunn's authorship has become better known, a fascinating story about the saying's provenance has also emerged. While studying English Literature at Sydney University more than thirty years ago, Dunn came across a book by a nineteenth-century freethinker that contained these words:

 

A man needs god like a fish needs a bicycle.

 

Dunn was so impressed with the analogy that she felt a slight rewording of it could serve as a perfect counter-argument to women who believed they needed a man to lead a complete life. The first appearance of her version came in the form of graffiti she scrawled on the walls of two women's restrooms in Sydney—one at a university theater and the other at a popular student drinking establishment. Regarding the slogan's humble origins, Dunn later told a reporter, “I only wrote it in those two spots, and it spread around the world.” Like the fellow who invented the happy face image in the 1960s, Dunn never copyrighted the saying, so up until now she has been only rarely credited as the author of the line. But her story is a wonderful example of how a well-crafted analogy can take on a life of its own and capture the imagination of millions. A decade or so after her line became a staple of feminist thought, it also inspired a number of clever spin-offs, including this from an unknown American male:

 

A man needs a woman like a neck needs a pain.

 

Friendship is another type of human relationship that has proved amena
ble to metaphorical description. In
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers
, written in the third century, Diogenes Laertius wrote of the Greek philosopher Aristotle:

 

To the query, “What is a friend?”
his reply was “A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”

 

Aristotle couldn't have known it, but around the same time on the other side of the known world, the Chinese sage Mencius said virtually the same thing: “Friendship is one mind in two bodies.” It's an illustration of the adage that great minds often do think alike, and it's also evidence that great minds often turn to figurative language when describing life's most important realities. The Aristotle and Mencius observations are among the most famous words ever written on friendship, but they are hardly the only eloquent words on the topic, or the only metaphorical ones:

 

A faithful friend is the medicine of life.

APOCRYPHA
—
Ecclesiasticus 6:16

Friendship is Love without his wings!

LORD BYRON

A friend is, as it were, a second self.

CICERO

Friendship is a sheltering tree.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

A friend is a present you give yourself.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

All human beings are caught up in a wide array of relationships, and all of them have been the subject of analogical and metaphorical observations. In the three chapters following this one, we will delve deeper into the subjects of
love
,
marriage & family life
, and
sex
. But in the remainder of this chapter, we will focus our attention on what people have had to say about relationships in general, the nature of friendship, romantic relationships, and the many fascinating things that men and women have said about each other.

 

Jealousy in romance is like salt in food.
A little can enhance the savor, but too much can spoil the pleasure
and, under certain circumstances, can be life-threatening.

MAYA ANGELOU

This comes from
Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
(1993). In a 1922 book,
Little Essays of Love and Virtue
, British psychologist Havelock Ellis warned couples about “the demon of jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive.”

 

Wishing to be friends is quick work,
but friendship is a slow-ripening fruit.

ARISTOTLE

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue
as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter,
to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

W. H. AUDEN

A pseudo-friend is the social equivalent of fast food:
a useful creature who can be called upon to deliver
a tasty illusion of friendship without the expense and bother.

RICK BAYAN

Man without woman would be like playing checkers alone.

JOSH BILLINGS
(Henry Wheeler Shaw)

It has been said that a pretty face is like a passport.
But it's not; it's a visa, and it runs out fast.

JULIE BURCHILL

Don't smother each other. No one can grow in the shade.

LEO BUSCAGLIA

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.

SAMUEL BUTLER

She understood, as women often do more easily than men,
that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat,
and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.

PETER CAREY

This observation, from Carey's 1989 novel
Oscar and Lucinda
, demonstrates that novelists are generally better than social scientists at describing why men and women have trouble communicating.

 

The heart of another is a dark forest, always,
no matter how close it has been to one's own.

WILLA CATHER,
in
The Professor's House
(1925)

A woman is like your shadow—
follow her, she flies; fly from her, she follows.

NICOLAS CHAMFORT

This eighteenth-century observation is also a lovely example of
chiasmus,
one of my very favorite rhetorical devices (see www.chiasmus.com).

 

A woman watches her body uneasily,
as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.

LEONARD COHEN

It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness
to the mechanisms of friendship.

COLETTE

Colette was the pen name of a Parisian music-hall dancer who became famous for her plays and novels (
Gigi
, her best-remembered work, was made into a popular 1958 movie starring Leslie Caron). Writing in 1898, African-American writer Frances E. W. Harper penned an equally impressive analogy on the subject: “True politeness is to social life what oil is to machinery, a thing to oil the ruts and grooves of existence.”

 

The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity,
as iron is most strongly united by the fiercest flame.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

This is from Colton's
Lacon
(1820), where he also wrote: “True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.”

 

In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male,
vindictiveness of the female.

CYRIL CONNOLLY

Women are like tricks by sleight of hand,
Which, to admire, we should not understand.

WILLIAM CONGREVE

The male is a domestic animal which,
if treated with firmness and kindness,
can be trained to do most things.

JILLY COOPER

The Emotional Bank Account represents
the quality of the relationship you have with others.
It's like a financial bank account in that you can
make “deposits,” by proactively doing things that build trust…
or “withdrawals,” by reactively doing things that decrease the level of trust.

STEVEN R. COVEY

This comes from
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families
(1997), a sequel to the 1990 best-seller,
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
, where Covey introduced the concept of an
emotional bank account
. It's a powerful metaphor and a helpful reminder that we should strive to make more deposits and fewer withdrawals.

 

The happiest moment in any affair takes place
after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover
and before the maddening personality of either party
has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity.