I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like
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MARCEL PROUST
Giving a man space is like giving a dog a computer:
the chances are he will not use it wisely.
BETTE-JANE RAPHAEL
A man’s heart may have a secret sanctuary where only one woman may enter,
but it is full of little anterooms which are seldom vacant.
HELEN ROWLAND, on men’s tendency to stray
Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets—
they’re more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.
MAY SARTON
Though friendship is not quick to burn,
It is explosive stuff.
MAY SARTON
That common cold of the male psyche, fear of commitment.
RICHARD SCHICKEL
Breaking up is like knocking over a coke machine.
You can’t do it in one push.
You’ve gotta rock it back and forth a few times, and then it goes over.
JERRY SEINFELD
What is a date, really, but a job interview that lasts all night?
JERRY SEINFELD
Seinfeld added: “The only difference is that in not many job interviews is there a chance you’ll wind up naked.” Comedian Eddie Murphy put it more coarsely, but his metaphor enjoys great popularity among college boys and young adult men: “When you’re dating, you’re just leasing the pussy with an option to buy.”
It is assumed that the woman must wait,
motionless, until she is wooed.
That is how the spider waits for the fly.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Dating is a lot like sports.
You have to practice; you work out; you study the greats.
You hope to make the team, and it hurts to be cut.
SINBAD
The game women play is men.
ADAM SMITH
Going out with a jerky guy
is kind of like having a piece of food caught in your teeth.
All your friends notice it before you do.
LIVIA SQUIRES
Glances are the heavy artillery of the flirt:
everything can be conveyed in a look,
yet that look can always be denied,
for it cannot be quoted word for word.
STENDHAL (pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle)
Some looks, however, cannot be denied. One was famously described by the French writer known as Colette: “When she raises her eyelids, it’s as if she were taking off all her clothes.”
The great majority of men, especially in France,
both desire and possess a fashionable woman,
much in the way one might own a fine horse—
as a luxury befitting a young man.
STENDHAL (pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle)
Man is the hunter; woman is his game.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
Friends do not live in harmony, merely, as some say, but in melody.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Indeed, we do not really live unless we have friends surrounding us
like a firm wall against the winds of the world.
CHARLES HANSON TOWNE
Talking with a man is like trying to saddle a cow.
You work like hell, but what’s the point?
GLADYS UPHAM
The first time you buy a house you think how pretty it is and sign the check.
The second time you look to see if the basement has termites.
It’s the same with men.
LUPE VÉLEZ
Be courteous to all, but intimate with few,
and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.
True friendship is a plant of slow growth
and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity
before it is entitled to the appellation.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
This comes from a 1783 letter. You may be more familiar with another plant metaphor from Washington: “Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.” Also on the roots theme, George Eliot wrote in Daniel Deronda (1874): “Friendships begin with liking or gratitude—roots that can be pulled up.”
Assumptions are the termites of relationships.
HENRY WINKLER
This is a fabulous metaphor from an unexpected source, perfectly describing how assumptions can slowly eat away at the foundation of a relationship. Winkler inserted the line in the middle of a 1995 commencement address he gave at his alma mater, Emerson College in Boston.
What magic there is in a girl’s smile. It is the raisin which,
dropped in the yeast of male complacency, induces fermentation.
P. G. WODEHOUSE
chapter 8
Love Is an Exploding Cigar We Willingly Smoke
In his 1995 novel Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres tells the story of Pelagia Iannis, a young beauty who lives with her physician father on the small Greek island of Cephalonia. When the island is overtaken by Italian troops in the early days of World War II, Dr. Iannis and his daughter are forced to billet the officer in command, Captain Antonio Corelli, in their house. Corelli is a handsome and cultured man who always travels with his prized mandolin. His passion for music is matched by a disdain for military life, which he demonstrates by replying “Heil Puccini” whenever he is offered the Nazi greeting “Heil Hitler.” The beautiful Pelagia soon falls for Corelli, even though she is betrothed to a young Greek fisherman who has left to fight in the war. The developing love affair gravely concerns her father, who sits her down one day and says:
Love is a kind of dementia
with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms.
After ticking off some of the “symptoms” that he has observed in the young lovers, Dr. Iannis launches into an extended analogy. I was captivated when I first read the passage, and I hope you will enjoy it as well:
Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides.
And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out
whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable
that you should ever part. Because this is what love is.
Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement,
it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not
the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake
at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body….
That is just being “in love,” which any fool can do.
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away,
and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it,
we had roots that grew towards each other underground,
and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches,
we found that we were one tree and not two.
In the first portion of the passage, Dr. Iannis offers one of history’s oldest metaphors: love is mental illness. Plato may have been the first to express it:
Love is a grave mental disease.
In As You Like It, Shakespeare has Rosalind say it this way: “Love is merely a madness.” And over the centuries, many others have echoed the theme:
Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal
of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder.
AMBROSE BIERCE
Love is a pardonable insanity.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that.
It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion….
You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can’t even think straight.
MARILYN FRENCH
Romantic love is mental illness. But it’s a pleasurable one.
It’s a drug. It distorts reality, and that’s the point of i
t.
It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
Returning to Dr. Iannis’s lecture to his daughter, you will notice that he moves from one metaphor—love is mental illness—to another: love is the intertwining of roots. Out of the ashes of a passionate love, he argues, a deep-rooted and intertwined love often emerges, turning separate individuals into one entity. It’s a beautiful passage and a nice reminder that after the fireworks of the early years, the most important dynamics of love are not obvious but go on beneath the surface. In his 1978 book Thoughts in a Dry Season, Gerald Brenan said it this way:
Married love is a stream that, after a certain length of time,
sinks into the earth and flows underground.
Something is there, but one does not know what.
Only the vegetation shows that there is still water.
In the first century B.C., Ovid was the most popular writer in the Roman Empire. Born into an old and respectable family, the young Ovidius—his formal Latin name—showed early academic promise and was educated by the best teachers of the day. While he showed great potential as an orator, he turned to writing instead, ultimately focusing on love and amorous intrigue. He described the dynamics of love in such a captivating way that his first book, Amores, was devoured by the sophisticated and pleasure-seeking society in which he lived. The book was so popular it was followed by what we now call sequels: The Art of Love, The Art of Beauty, and Remedies for Love. Ovid was married three times, finally finding contentment in his third marriage. But his first two marriages were short-lived and not particularly harmonious, giving special relevance to a line that appeared in The Art of Love:
Love is a kind of warfare.
Ovid carried the metaphor further when he suggested that the wounds of love are as common as the wounds of war—and just as lethal:
As many as the shells that are on the shore,
so many are the pains of love;
the darts that wound are steeped in much poison.
Ovid was one of the first people in history to say that love is war, which rivals love is mental illness as the most popular metaphor on the subject. After Ovid, the theme has been pursued by many others:
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does.
Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
JAMES BALDWIN
If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.
If you say, “No! I don’t want it right now,”
that’s when you’ll get it for sure.
Love will make a way out of no way.
LYNDA BARRY
Love and war are the same thing, and stratagems
and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
It is the same in love as in war; a fortress that parleys is half taken.
MARGUERITE DE VALOIS
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
H. L. MENCKEN
In addition to insanity and war, fire is another common metaphor for the passion of love. The notion also goes back to ancient times. In the first century B.C. the Roman poet Virgil wrote the Aeneid, an epic poem that contains this line:
I feel again a spark of that ancient flame.
That ancient flame—the flame of love—has been a central theme in world literature. In The Divine Comedy, written in the early 1300s, Dante used the metaphor to suggest that a great passion can spring from a modest beginning:
A great flame follows a little spark.
In the seventeenth century, an English proverb commonly attributed to English cleric Jeremy Taylor continued the theme and became one of history’s most popular observations:
Love is friendship set on fire.
As the centuries passed, scores of writers have continued to compare love to fire. Lord Byron saw love as a kind of celestial fire, calling it “a light from heaven, a spark of that immortal fire.” Honoré de Balzac wrote that “Love is like the devil,” adding “Whom it has in its clutches it surrounds with flames.” And the Chilean poet and 1971 Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda expressed it this way:
To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life.
Henry Ward Beecher, one of America’s most influential preachers, found the concept helpful in explaining the difference between youthful and mature love:
Young love is a flame;
very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering.
The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals,
deep-burning, unquenchable.
While the hot and fierce flame of love blazes gloriously, it too often burns out. The phenomenon has been commonly described in literature, but rarely as simply and starkly as in this 1862 passage from Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons:
But within a month it was all over:
the fire had kindled for the last time and had died for ever.
Of all the love is fire metaphors in my collection, though, my favorite comes from a woman who is best remembered for her great acting ability and her not-so-great parenting skills. In 1943, actress Joan Crawford was quoted as saying:
Love is a fire.
But whether it is going to warm your hearth
or burn down your house, you can never tell.
So far, we’ve seen love likened to mental illness, war, and fire. In the rest of the chapter you’ll see many more love metaphors. For centuries, as love has been rhapsodized by the romantics, skewered by the cynics, and demonized by the disillusioned, it has been done with an extraordinary array of analogies, metaphors, and similes. Whatever your views on love, you’ll find support for your position, and maybe have your thinking stimulated along the way.
Without love our life is…a ship without a rudder.
SHOLEM ALEICHEM
Love is a net that catches hearts like a fish
MUHAMMAD ALI
This appeared in a 2004 Esquire magazine article titled “What I’ve Learned.” The piece contains many sayings that Ali did not author (like “Wisdom is knowing when you can’t be wise”) but that he says have guided his life.
Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy.
GORDON W. ALLPORT
Love as a healing force is a tenet of modern psychology. Karl Menninger put it this way: “Love is a medicine for the sickness of the world; a prescription often given, too rarley taken.” Eric Berne added succinctly, “Love is nature’s psychotherapy.”
Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.
MAYA ANGELOU
Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.
JEAN ANOUILH
This is from the novel Ardèle (1948), where Anouilh also wrote: “Oh, love is real enough; you will find it someday, but it has one arch-enemy—and that is life.”
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart,
as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower,
with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Balzac also wrote, “Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature.”
Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke.
LYNDA BARRY
What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Love is the wine of existence
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Beecher, the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom’s Cabin fame, also wrote, “Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another’s heart, or its flame burns low.”
Memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
In this extremely interesting analogy, Bowen suggests that it is the memories of lovers that form the foundation for love.<
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To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
When success comes in the door, it seems,
love often goes out the window.
DR. JOYCE BROTHERS
Love doesn’t drop on you unexpectedly; you have to give off signals, sort of like an amateur radio operator.
HELEN GURLEY BROWN
Love is the wild card of existence.
RITA MAE BROWN
One of the best things about love—
the feeling of being wrapped, like a gift, in understanding.
ANATOLE BROYARD
As the cat lapses into savagery by night,
and barbarously explores the dark,
so primal and titanic is a woman with the love-madness.
GELETT BURGESS
Once love is purged of vanity,
it resembles a feeble convalescent, hardly able to drag itself about.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
Love is more pleasant than marriage
for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
Chamfort’s point is that novels are fiction and history is reality—and the fictions surrounding love are more pleasant than the realities surrounding marriage.
In love as in art, good technique helps.
MASON COOLEY
Love is an alliance of friendship and of lust:
if the former predominates, it is a passion exalted and refined;
but if the latter, gross and sensual.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Love is a friendship set to music.
E. JOSEPH COSSMAN
Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone—
but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
BETTE DAVIS
Love never dies of starvation, but often of digestion.
NINON DE LENCLOS