metaphor

Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

I'm like a circus standing on two legs.

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

On this material plane, each living being is like a street lantern lamp with a dirty lampshade.The inside flame burns evenly and is of the same quality as all the rest__ence all of us are equal in the absolute sense, the essence, in the quality of our energy.However, some of the lamps are __urned down_ and having less light in them, burn fainter, (the beings have a less defined individuality, are less in tune with the universal All which is the same as the Will)__ence all of us are unequal in a relative sense, some of us being more aware (human beings), and others being less aware (animal beings), with small wills and small flames.The lampshades of all are stained with the clutter of the material reality or the physical world.As a result, it is difficult for the light of each lamp to shine through to the outside and it is also difficult to see what is on the other side of the lampshade that represents the external world (a great thick muddy ocean of fog), and hence to __eel_ a connection with the other lantern lamps (other beings).The lampshade is the physical body immersed in the ocean of the material world, and the limiting host of senses that it comes with.The dirt of the lampshade results from the cluttering bulk of life experience accumulated without a specific goal or purpose.The dirtier the lampshade, the less connection each soul has to the rest of the universe__nd this includes its sense of connection to other beings, its sense of dual presence in the material world and the metaphysical world, and the thin connection line to the wick of fuel or the flow of electricity that resides beyond the material plane and is the universal energy.To remain __it_ each lantern lamp must tap into the universal Source of energy.If the link is weak, depression and-or illness sets in.If the link is strong, life persists.This metaphor to me best illustrates the universe.

Guilt is the toothache of the soul.

Doubt as sin. _ Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature _ is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.

If you want to change the world, change the metaphor.

Everything's always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.

Men feel about sex the way vampires feel about blood. They don't just like it, they crave it. That's why vampire stories always have strong sexual undercurrents. A vampire's hunger is simply a metaphor for a man's lust. And if a guy is paying attention to you, he wants to have sex with you.

My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They were women, she wrote. Starting out small girls, tiny streams decorated with wildflowers. They were torrents, gouging paths through sheer granite, flinging themselves off cliffs, fearless and irresistible. Later, they grew fat servicable, broad slow curves carrying commerce and sewage, but in their unconscious depths catfish gorged, grew the size of barges, and in the hundred-year storms, they rose up, forgetting the promises they made, the wedding vows, and drowned everything for miles around. Finally they gave out, birth-emptied, malarial, into a fan of swamps that met the ocean.

It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll's house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it.

She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.

The world is a room of heavy furniture. Eventually you are allowed to leave.

The soldier stared at Ingrid. His silence was elastic, slowly curling a rope around her neck.

The predominant cancer metaphor is war. We fight cancer, usually valiantly. We attack tumors and try to annihilate them and bring out our arsenals to do that, and so on. It's us against cancer. This metaphor has come in for its share of criticism within the ethical, psychological and even oncological disciplines. A main concern is that when someone dies of cancer, the message that remains is that that person just hasn't fought hard enough, was not a brave enough soldier against the ultimate foe, did not really want to win.The cancer-is-war metaphor does not seem to allow space for the idea that in actual war, some soldiers die heroically for the larger good, no matter which side wins. War is death. In the cancer war, if you die, you've lost and cancer has won. The dead are responsible not just for getting cancer, but also for failing to defeat it.

Labels such as ___he culture wars,__ ___he science wars,__ or ___he Freud wars__ are now widely used to refer to some of the disagreements thatplague contemporary intellectual life ... But I would like to register a gentle protest. Metaphors influence the mind in many unnoticed ways. The willingness to describe fierce disagreement in terms of the metaphors of war makes the very existence of real wars seem more natural, more inevitable,more a part of the human condition. It also betrays us into an insensibility toward the very idea of war, so that we are less prone to be aware of how totally disgusting real wars really are.

Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers.And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.