I am curious how many of you on the list know or could guess at the
author
of the following quote:
I am interested in your guesses; if you know it for SURE, please hold
off
guessing.
*I would be willing to throw away everything else but that: enthusiasm
tamed by metaphor. Let me rest the case there. Enthusiasm tamed to
metaphor, tamed to that much of it. I do not think anybody ever knows
the
discreet use of metaphor, his own and other people’s, the discreet
handling
of metaphor, unless he has been properly educated in poetry.*
*Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, “grace”
metaphors,
and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides
the
one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People
say,
“Why don’t you say what you mean?” We never do that, do we,
being all of us
too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in
indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct.*
*I have wanted in late years to go further and further in making
metaphor
the whole of thinking. I find someone now and then to agree with me
that
all thinking, except mathematical thinking, is metaphorical, or all
thinking except scientific thinking. The mathematical might be
difficult
for me to bring in, but the scientific is easy enough.*
*Once on a time all the Greeks were busy telling each other what the
All
was—or was like unto. All was three elements, air, earth, and water
(we
once thought it was ninety elements; now we think it is only one). All
was
substance, said another. All was change, said a third. But best and
most
fruitful was Pythagoras’ comparison of the universe with number.
Number of
what? number of feet, pounds, and seconds was the answer, and we had
science and all that has followed in science. The metaphor has held
and
held, breaking down only when it came to the spiritual and
psychological or
the out of the way places of the physical.*
*The other day we had a visitor here, a noted scientist, whose latest
word
to the world has been that the more accurately you know where a thing
is,
the less accurately you are able to state how fast it is moving. You
can
see why that would be so, without going back to Zeno’s problem of
the
arrow’s flight. In carrying numbers into the realm of space and at
the same
time into the realm of time you are mixing metaphors, that is all, and
you
are in trouble. They won’t mix. The two don’t go together.*
*Let’s take two or three more of the metaphors now in use to live
by. I
have just spoken of one of the new ones, a charming mixed metaphor
right in
the realm of higher mathematics and higher physics: that the more
accurately you state where a thing is, the less accurately you will be
able
to tell how fast it is moving. And, of course, everything is moving.
Everything is an event now. Another metaphor. A thing, they say, is
all
event. Do you believe it is? Not quite. I believe it is almost all
event.
But I like the comparison of a thing with an event.*
*I notice another from the same quarter. “In the neighborhood of
matter
space is something like curved.” Isn’t that a good one! It seems
to me that
that is simply and utterly charming—to say that space is something
like
curved in the neighborhood of matter. “Something like.”*
*Another amusing one is from—what is the book?—I can’t say it
now; but here
is the metaphor. Its aim is to restore you to your ideas of free will.
It
wants to give you back your freedom of will. All right, here it is on
a
platter. You know that you can’t tell by name what persons in a
certain
class will be dead ten years after graduation, but you can tell
actuarially
how many will be dead. Now, just so this scientist says of the
particles of
matter flying at a screen, striking a screen; you can’t tell what
individual particles will collide, but you can say in general that a
certain number will strike in a given time. It shows, you see, that
the
individual particle can come freely. I asked Bohr about that
particularly,
and he said, “Yes , It is so. It can come when it wills and as it
wills;
and the action of the individual particle is unpredictable. But it is
not
so of the action of the mass. There you can predict.” He says,
“That gives
the individual atom its freedom, but the mass its necessity.*
*Another metaphor that has interested us in our time and has done all
our
thinking for us is the metaphor of evolution. Never mind going into
the
Latin word. The metaphor is simply the metaphor of the growing plant
or of
the growing thing. And somebody very brilliantly, quite a while ago,
said
that the whole universe, the whole of everything, was like unto a
growing
thing. That is all. I know the metaphor will break down at some point,
but
it has not failed everywhere. It is a very brilliant metaphor, I
acknowledge, though I myself get too tired of the kind of essay that
talks
about the evolution of candy, we will say, or the evolution of
elevators—the evolution of this, that, and the other. Everything is
evolution. I emancipate myself by simply saying that I didn’t get up
the
metaphor and so am not much interested in it.*
*What I am pointing out is that unless you are at home in the
metaphor,
unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor,
you are
not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values:
you
don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You
don’t know
how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you.
You
are not safe with science; you are not safe in history. In history,
for
instance—to show that [it] is the same in history as elsewhere—I
heard
somebody say yesterday that Aeneas was to be likened unto (those
words,
“likened unto”!) George Washington. He was that type of national
hero, the
middle-class man, not thinking of being a hero at all, bent on
building the
future, bent on his children, his descendents. A good metaphor, as far
as
it goes, and you must know how far. And then he added that Odysseus
should
be likened unto Theodore Roosevelt. I don’t think that is so good.
Someone
visiting Gibbon at the point of death, said he was the same Gibbon as
of
old, still at his parallels.*
*Take the way we have been led into our present position morally, the
world
over. It is by a sort of metaphorical gradient. There is a kind of
thinking—to speak metaphorically—there is a kind of thinking you
might say
was endemic in the brothel. It was always there. And every now and
then in
some mysterious way it becomes epidemic in the world. And how does it
do
so? By using all the good words that virtue has invented to maintain
virtue. It uses honesty, first,—frankness, sincerity—those words;
picks
them up, uses them. “In the name of honesty, let us see what we
are.” You
know. And then it picks up the word joy. “Let us in the name of joy,
which
is the enemy of our ancestors, the Puritans….Let us in the name of
joy,
which is the enemy of the kill-joy Puritan…” You see. “Let
us,” and so on.
And then, “In the name of health….” Health is another good word.
And that
is the metaphor Freudianism trades on, mental health. And the first
thing
we know, it has us all in up to the top knot. I suppose we may blame
the
artists a good deal, because they are great people to spread by
metaphor.
The stage too—the stage is always a good intermediary between the
two
worlds, the under and the upper,—if I may say so without personal
prejudice
to the stage.*
*In all this I have only been saying that the devil can quote
Scripture,
which simply means that the good words you have lying around the devil
can
use for his purposes as well as anybody else. Never mind about my
morality.
I am not here to urge anything. I don’t care whether the world is
good or
bad—not on any particular day.*
*Let me ask you to watch a metaphor breaking down here before you.*
*Somebody said to me a little while ago, “It is easy enough for me
to think
of the universe as a machine, as a mechanism.”*
*I said, “You mean the universe is like a machine?”*
*He said, “No. I think it is one . . . Well, it is like . . .”*
*“I think you mean the universe is like a machine.”*
*“All right. Let it go at that.”*
*I asked him, “Did you ever see a machine without a pedal for the
foot, or
a lever for the hand, or a button for the finger?”*
*He said, “No—no.”*
*I said, “All right. Is the universe like that?”*
*And he said, “No. I mean it is like a machine, only . . .”*
*“. . . it is different from a machine,” I said.*
*He wanted to go just that far with that metaphor and no further. And
so do
we all. All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it.
It is
touch and go with the metaphor, and until you have lived with it long
enough you don’t know when it is going. You don’t know how much
you can get
out of it and when it will cease to yield. It is a very living thing.
It is
as life itself.*
*I have heard this ever since I can remember , and ever since I have
taught: the teacher must teach the pupil to think. I saw a teacher
once
going around in a great school and snapping pupils’ heads with thumb
and
finger and saying, “Think.” That was when thinking was becoming
the
fashion. The fashion hasn’t yet quite gone out.*
*We still ask boys in college to think, as in the nineties, but we
seldom
tell them what thinking means; we seldom tell them it is just putting
this
and that together; it is just saying one thing in terms of another. To
tell
them is to set their feet on the first rung of a ladder the top of
which
sticks through the sky.*
*Greatest of all attempts to say one thing in terms of another is the
philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in
terms
of matter, to make the final unity. That is the greatest attempt that
ever
failed. We stop just short there. But it is the height of poetry, the
height of all thinking, the height of all poetic thinking, that
attempt to
say matter in terms of spirit and spirit in terms of matter. It is
wrong to
anybody a materialist simply because he tries to say spirit in terms
of
matter, as if that were a sin. Materialism is not the attempt to say
all in
terms of matter. The only materialist—be he poet, teacher,
scientist,
politician, or statesman—is the man who gets lost in his material
without a
gathering metaphor to throw it into shape and order. He is the lost
soul.*
*We ask people to think, and we don’t show them what thinking is.
Somebody
says we don’t need to show them how to think; bye and bye they will
think.
We will give them the forms of sentences and, if they have any ideas,
then
they will know how to write them. But that is preposterous. All there
is to
writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.*
*The first little metaphor….Take some of the trivial ones. I would
rather
have trivial ones of my own to live by than the big ones of other
people.*
*I remember a boy saying, “He is the kind of person that wounds with
his
shield.” That may be a slender one, of course. It goes a good way in
character description. It has poetic grace. “He is the kind that
wounds
with his shield.”*
*The shield reminds me—just to linger a minute—the shield reminds
me of the
inverted shield spoken of in one of the books of the “Odyssey,”
the book
that tells about the longest swim on record. I forget how long it
lasted—several days, was it?—but at last as Odysseus came near the
coast of
Phaneacia, he saw it on the horizon “like an inverted shield.”*
*There is a better metaphor in the same book. In the end Odysseus
comes
ashore and crawls up the beach to spend the night under a double olive
tree, and it says, as in a lonely farmhouse where it is hard to get
fire—I
am not quoting exactly—where it is hard to start the fire again if
it goes
out, they cover the seeds of fire with ashes to preserve it for the
night,
so Odysseus covered himself with the leaves around him and went to
sleep.
There you have something that gives you character, something of
Odysseus
himself. “Seeds of fire.” So Odysseus covered the seeds of fire in
himself.
You get the greatness of his nature.*
*But these are slighter metaphors than the ones we live by. They have
their
charm, their passing charm. They are as it were the first steps toward
the
great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end.*
*The metaphor whose manage we are best taught in poetry—that is all
there
is of thinking. It may not seem far for the mind to go but it is the
mind’s
furthest. The richest accumulation of the ages is the noble metaphors
we
have rolled up.*
--
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
Clark University
nthomp...@clarku.edu
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
