Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (40 page)

If no memory whatsoever bubbled up in your mind as you read the description of the frenzied scene in the airport, we would be surprised. Human nature is such that we cannot help digging down unconsciously into the many layers of our memory in order to understand situations that others tell us about (and all the more so for situations that we encounter directly). We are creatures that live thanks to the efficient triggering of memories.

Whenever we hear of the divorce of a close friend, or of a fire in the home of some neighbors, or of a burglary in the neighborhood, or of a colleague’s car accident, or of a flat tire far out in the boondocks, or of a wedding ring lost and then miraculously recovered, or of an incredibly long line to get through security at the airport, or of a just-barely-missed airplane, or of someone who brazenly cut in line at the theater, or of friends getting lost at midnight in the middle of Slovenia, or of a twenty-dollar bill found on the sidewalk, or of a painful immunization required to get a visa, or of a moving reunion with someone after a separation of twenty-five years, or of a very serious cancer in remission, or of two people who randomly bumped into each other in an exotic land neither had visited before, or of a small child saved from drowning by her mother, or of a tortoise that turns up again in someone’s yard after not having been seen for three years — in short, whenever we hear about virtually any event at all that has some interest to us — then one or more specific memories just come floating up out of the subterranean murk without ever having been invited, and those memories afford us a personal perspective on the given event.

On the other hand, if we hear about a very bland event — a bill that was paid, a pizza that was eaten, a telephone that rang, a trip that was made to the grocery store, some distant relative’s flu, an old car getting sold, the construction of a building somewhere in the suburbs, and on and on — then what gets evoked in our head is much less specific and detailed than in the cases that pique our curiosity. After all, we’ve all experienced or witnessed many cases of the flu, seen hundreds of buildings under construction, not to mention eaten pizzas or watched them being eaten. Our countless experiences with pizza-eating have been stored in memory and have piled up one on top of the other to the point where they’ve simply blurred together and made a composite and rather vague image that is the category of
pizza consumption
, and it’s this image that is generally evoked, rather than a highly specific pizza-eating anecdote, when someone tells us that they just had a pizza at their local pizzeria.

Every story that we hear, whether it fascinates us or bores us, consists of many small components put together in a unique way, such as the story of the pizza that our aunt ate at the airport recently and that nearly made her miss her plane. The anecdote as a whole may well remind us of a specific story that happened to us — for instance, the time when we nearly missed a train because we spent a few moments getting a soft drink from a vending machine — but its tiny component, the humble pizza, doesn’t
evoke any anecdote at all on its own. Whereas a one-sentence pizza-eating
anecdote
is easily capable of coaxing explicit memories out of your unconscious storehouse, most if not all of the
words
making it up do no such thing. Look, for instance, at the various words in this very paragraph and ask yourself if any of them — for example, “ate”, “but”, “humble”, or “words” — summoned an entire anecdote to mind.

We would be lost if every single word (or stock phrase or idiomatic expression) in a long tale dredged its own anecdote up out of long-term memory. Were that to happen, we would be engulfed in a tidal wave of random stories and we would drown in the catastrophic mental confusion that would ensue. But luckily no such thing takes place, because only once in a blue moon does a mere word in a story (a “cameo actor”, so to speak) trigger the retrieval of an anecdote.

Reminding is a profound mystery, as the following case shows.

Below we present a more lyrical viewpoint on these two parallel stories, coming from our friend Kellie Gutman, who recounted them in the form of verse. The poem about her husband Dick was written originally to commemorate their cruise down the Nile, and a couple of years later, when we asked her, Kellie graciously indulged us by writing a twin poem about Danny at the Grand Canyon, adhering to precisely the same poetic constraints. For the French version of our book, we translated these two poems, once again obeying all the original poetic constraints, and in
Chapter 6
, where we discuss the role of analogy in translation, we will come back to these poems.

Arizona Ants

When Doug and Carol and their son,

a toddling Danny, all of one,

left Indiana on a trip

out West, they knew they couldn’t skip

the Grandest Canyon known, bar none.

They piled into their clipper ship

with no set plan, but just a notion

to shoot for the Pacific Ocean,

with detours here and there, thus reaping

the benefits of highways sweeping

across the landscape. Gentle motion

would lull their infant into sleeping,

while Mom and Dad drank in the views

of Colorado’s Rockies, whose

steep craggy peaks filled them with awe.

They drove through reservations, saw

the Navajo, and got to choose

some turquoise stones without a flaw.

At last, the North Rim: strange striations

with shades evoking exclamations —

unless you’re Danny… Then you treasure

the leaves and bugs! While grownups measure

the grandeur of vast rock formations,

you play with ants — a simpler pleasure.

Karnak Caps

The bottlecaps were all around

us, rusted remnants that once crowned

the Cokes and Fantas near the shop

that sold falafels, where we’d stop.

In Alexandria, the ground

was paved with flattened tops from pop.

We left for Cairo next, departing

the same day Dick announced, “I’m starting

an Egypt bottlecap collection!”

Each specimen, upon inspection,

was added to his pile for carting

back home. He had a wide selection:

in every bar, for every beer,

his pointing outstretched hand made clear

the cap was what he had in mind.

On dusty streets, he searched behind

the soda stands (a new frontier!),

and often came back with a find.

In Karnak’s heat, our guide expounded

on gods and temples, while surrounded

by columns far too grand to measure.

We contemplated them with pleasure,

but as we gazed on high, dumbfounded,

Dick stooped to pluck a humbler treasure
.

As described here, Doug’s reminding may not seem particularly striking, but you have been handed the two analogous scenarios on a silver platter. It would be quite simple,
ex post facto
, to display in a diagram the identical conceptual skeletons of the two situations, or to encode each separate story into a concise sequence of formal expressions exhibiting a perfect one-to-one correspondence. But such a diagram or chart would not do justice to what goes on in the human mind when such remindings take place out of the blue. Such a display would be reminiscent once again of Procrustes, who always obtains the result he desires (in this case, his heart is set on creating a flawless one-to-one matchup between two sequences of formal expressions) but only at a great sacrifice (a complete neglect of the complex mental processing that underlies the discovery of the analogy), which makes the whole exercise of little interest. An
ex post facto
diagram might be an elegant summary of the result of Doug’s reminding, but it wouldn’t cast the slightest light on how the reminding took place inside his head.

There is, after all, a deep scientific mystery here. Over fifteen years had elapsed since the Grand Canyon visit, and in all that time, Doug had only very rarely — a handful of times at most — thought about that fleeting moment of fascination, on his son’s part, for the ants and the leaf. While they were on their Nile cruise, the furthest thing from Doug’s mind was this memory. How, then, could such a distant, shadowy memory have been so rapidly and easily brought back to life in Doug’s mind?

As we pointed out at the start of
Chapter 1
, everyday situations are not handed to us in pre-wrapped packages — that is, with precise boundaries that surgically carve them away from the rest of the world. Rather, we filter our environment, dealing with only part of it, and in a biased manner. Each person somehow “decides” (that is, encodes) what a situation includes and doesn’t include, and what its key ingredients are. This of course takes place on the fly and not in the least consciously: at every moment of our life, we are as busy as a beaver, encoding situations in memory along dimensions that will determine which future events will be able to remind us of these situations.

How was the small event at the Grand Canyon originally perceived by Doug and stored in his memory? The privileged candidates for the encoding were, first of all, the most local and visually salient aspects of the scene — thus, the huge canyon, the little boy sitting on the sand, the sandy soil, the ants, the leaf, and so forth. Next, on a more global level, the encoding might have included the reasons for the trip, the route that had been followed, the other national parks that had been visited, the car they were driving, the year, the season, the weather that afternoon, the ever-present car seat for the toddler, and various other details.

Other more abstract aspects of the situation were certainly encoded as well — namely, the relative sizes of the key entities in the story, and their wildly different levels of importance in the culture (the fame of the canyon as opposed to the insignificance of the ants and leaves). Last but not least, the feelings of surprise and irony were crucial aspects of this scene, and had to be included in the memory package as well. However, had Doug merely tagged this complex event with a very general label like “ironic” or “surprising”, that index on its own couldn’t possibly have triggered the reminding, since untold thousands of other ironic and surprising events were stored in his memory, and none of those were brought to his mind by the Karnak bottlecap event.

Indeed, any event that Doug saw, no matter how ironic and surprising it might be, wouldn’t stand a chance of re-evoking his memory of Danny at the Grand Canyon unless it shared other key features with that old story. However, local features alone wouldn’t do the trick, either. The commonplace event of seeing somebody in a random place stoop over to pick up a small object on the ground would not suffice to get Doug to recall his son playing with ants at the Grand Canyon; if such a reminding took place, it would seem weird and senseless. Equally critical for the triggering of the old story is that the second event’s encoding should explicitly include the contrast between an insignificant object and a grandiose setting, which gives rise to a sense of absurdity. We
thus see that the most abstract aspects of this situation mingled inseparably with some of its most specific aspects, and that the reminding was due to similarities at several levels at once. In short, the encoding of a situation, if it is to facilitate appropriate remindings in the future, must be both abstract and concrete. While the encoding has to retain some salient details, it must also include salient abstract characteristics.