George still says, “When I turn fifty years old”, and yet his fiftieth birthday took place six months ago.
To call home, Larry dials the phone number that he used to have before he moved.
Julie forgets that her cousin gave birth to a second baby last year, and she asks her cousin how her son is doing as if there were only one.
A newly promoted lieutenant is caught off guard every time he hears anyone address him as “Captain Green”.
Lisa studied elementary education in college, and by coincidence her first teaching internship was in the classroom of her fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Long. He told her to call him “Marty”, and she tried, but often she blurted out “Mr. Long” by reflex.
A curious thing about the foregoing list is that nary a one of its members belongs strictly to the category defined above in italics, because if you read the fine print, you will see that it involves someone making an error in writing. And yet, the range of situations remains quite faithful to the word “that”, as used by Peter in his phrase “That happens to me every January.” Poor absent-minded Marsha or Captain Green could say to Carol, to console her, “Don’t feel bad — that happens to me all the time!”
The above list of scenarios greatly extends the category centered on Carol’s slip in signing and extended by Peter’s throwaway pronoun “that” — and yet it does so without in any way diluting the category’s essence. To the contrary, this broadening of the category, this fleshing-out of a kind of “sphere”, has made the category’s essence more vivid — namely, it is those habits that persist despite a sudden change that makes them invalid, or put otherwise, it consists of those situations in which one is trapped by a reflex that one has trouble reprogramming.
Someone might well ask, “Was such a conceptual sphere born only when Peter made his consoling remark to Carol?” We would reply that when Peter heard Carol’s lament, he understood its literal sense perfectly, but at the same time he extracted from it a more general idea — a more abstract notion that could apply to anyone, at any time, in any place. Peter’s phrase “that happens to me” was an act of unconscious pluralization, an offhand act of abstraction that broadened a “mental dot” (consisting of a single event) into a small “mental sphere” (a nascent concept).
Indeed, any sentence uttered by a human is implicitly surrounded by one or more “variations on a theme” (since no situation has only one essence) that come without bidding to the minds of listeners. That is, once a situation has been described, it naturally invites analogies to be made that will generalize it and render its essence (or rather, one of its essences) ever clearer. Such a generalized situation, created as an automatic by-product of a person’s comprehension of an uttered sentence, amounts to a new abstract category; as such, it invites simple mental slippages that will link it by analogy to yet other situations, differing in minor or even major ways from the “charter members”, and these situations will in turn become new members of the category. This process of repeated category extension based on analogy-making allows the fledgling category to expand very far, depending, of course, on the particular analogous situations that happen to be encountered as time goes by. And as the concept continues to grow outwards, the key idea that lies behind it becomes ever sharper in the mind of the person who is building it up, like a knife growing sharper with each new use.
A Piano in His Bed?
David, a jazz musician who plays piano, trumpet, and guitar, one day heard that one of his old friends from music-school days, a bassoonist, had fallen off the roof of her parents’ house when she was fixing it up with her father, and the doctors said that she would never walk again. And yet the very next day after the accident, she managed to sit up in her hospital bed and ask for her bassoon. On hearing this, David exclaimed, “Unbelievable! I would never have been able to do that.”
Just what did he mean he would be unable to do? Was he imagining himself in the hospital, one day after having fallen from his parents’ roof while repairing it with his father, sitting up and asking for one of his three instruments (and we won’t even mention the idea of a bassoon!) to be brought to him? It seems very doubtful. Most likely, he simply wanted to communicate his admiration for the astonishing pluck of his former classmate as she struggled with the meaning of the tragic accident. And yet it’s not possible to completely suppress the image of David in his hospital bed shortly after some sort of traumatic accident, probably some kind of fall, asking for his trumpet (of his three instruments, the one that most resembles a bassoon).
It’s unlikely that David had a very precise idea of what he meant by his throwaway remark, but probably what he had in mind, and wanted to evoke in his listeners’ minds, was located somewhere between an extremely rarefied abstraction (any human act that reveals surprising pluckiness) and a nearly exact replay of the event (in which David himself would have fallen off his friend’s roof while working with her father, heard that he would be paralyzed for life, and the very next day asked for a musical instrument in his hospital bed). Such a midway scenario, featuring a set of middle-sized conceptual slippages, might be one in which David, shortly after being hit by an unexpected lfe-changing event, resists the temptation towards self-pity and rage and instead focuses on some passionate interest, perhaps musical, perhaps not, that he has had for many years.
Damn that Dam
One evening in Cairo toward the end of his first visit to Egypt, Nick took a taxi to go to a restaurant. Being naturally chatty and curious, Nick struck up a conversation with the taxi driver, who said that he was from the southern half of the country and belonged to the ancient tribe of the Nubians. On hearing this, Nick, who had recently visited the huge dam built by a Russian–Egyptian consortium on the Nile in the city of Aswan, where many Nubians live, asked the driver, “What effect did the building of the dam have on the Nubians?” The driver replied, “It was not good at all for us.” Nick said compassionately, “Yeah… It always turns out that way.”
The key question is: What was Nick actually talking about? Was he alluding to the previous dam built on the Nile at Aswan some seventy years earlier by a British–Egyptian consortium? Or to some other dams on the Nile in Egypt, located near cities where Nubians live? Or to other tribes that live in Egypt, or that live on the Nile in general? Or to all large-scale acts of construction undertaken by the Egyptian government that had infringed on minority groups? Or to any acts undertaken by any governments at all that infringed on minority groups? Or to any acts of construction that brought suffering on any group of people? Or was his remark the benevolent expression of a generalized sadness concerning the dwindling fate of native peoples scattered all around today’s industrial world? Or did he mean that the weak are always victims no matter what happens? Most likely Nick himself didn’t really know what he meant, and was simply leaving the door open to most of these possibilities (and possibly others). Nothing comes through unambiguously about either the scale or the nature of the category that Nick concocted in his off-the-cuff remark. Many interpretations are plausible, but all of them rely on analogy and go far beyond the specific case of the Aswan Dam and the Nubians, and each one corresponds to a blurry-edged category.
Banalogies by the Bucketful
The last few sections focused on the phenomenon of “banalogies”, in order to give some sense of their great frequency in everyday thinking. The diversity of the phrases that people use to convey such banal analogies hints at how common the phenomenon is, but on the other hand, this very richness hides one key difficulty for would-be collectors. Indeed, these simple analogies can slip by even the most attentive of ears, because the analogies are not spelled out explicitly and the sentences that express them tend to be bland and boring-sounding.
Just as an ordinary-looking figure wearing bland clothing does not stand out in a large crowd, especially when one is paying attention to the more striking people and activities all around, so me-too analogies don’t draw any attention to themselves in the midst of a spar
kling conversation. Although they are understood with no problem, they tend to go by unnoticed. However, one helpful hint for people interested in studying the phenomenon is that they are often conveyed by phrases such as “I won’t let that happen again!” or “There you go again!” or “I’ll watch out from now on!” or “Next time this happens” or “Exactly the same thing happened to me!” or “I have that habit, too” or “I won’t ever fall for that again” or “That’s what you said last time” or “Don’t let them treat you that way ever again!” — and so on. Though bland, these are giveaway phrases. Another helpful hint is the word “exact” or “exactly”, as in the phrase “The exact same thing happened to me the other day!” The person who comes out with such a phrase is generally alluding to two situations that share a conceptual skeleton despite having many differences at the superficial level. Thus, for instance:
A man tries to read in bed but his wife says that even the extremely small battery-operated light that he attaches to his book keeps her from sleeping. Exasperated, he complains about her hypersensitivity to light. Not missing a beat, she replies, “You should talk! You do exactly the same thing in the morning. If I get up early and try to dress as quietly as a mouse, you always say that the noise, no matter how tiny it is, wakes you up. You’re the one who’s hypersensitive!”
A woman says that she had to cut her vacation short and head home immediately because during a huge thunderstorm her apartment had gotten flooded in two feet of water. Her friend says that he’d had “just the same experience” a few years earlier when he was in the middle of an important meeting at work and was called home because the neighbors’ house was on fire.
This reveals that when we listen to others tell stories, we all strip off each story’s surface particulars instantly, automatically, and unconsciously, until we feel we have arrived at the story’s true essence, and we then take that skeletal essence as the genuine core of what we’ve just heard. It strikes us as being “what really matters here”. But this conceptual skeleton, this abstract core, this pure gist, is too stripped-down, too “naked” for us, and so we immediately try to wrap it into more familiar clothing by launching a search in our memory. And it is when a concrete personal experience comes bubbling up from our memory that we can most easily relate, in a concrete and vivid fashion, to what we have just been told. This explains why people can quite honestly exclaim, “Exactly the same thing happened to me!”; they are concentrating so hard on the shared conceptual skeletons of two stories that for them the differences, no matter how great they are, seem to evaporate. At the gist level, indeed, the two stories are exactly the same — they are just one single story.
How We Try to Understand Our Own and Others’ Experiences
Our natural inclination to relate to stories told by other people by converting them into first-person experiences dredged out of our dormant memories — this propensity to make analogies that link us with other people, or, more generally, to interpret any new situation in terms of another similar situation that comes to mind — is omnipresent, because doing so fulfills a deep psychological need.
Virginia receives her semi-annual royalty statement from her publisher. Eagerly she scans its pages of data. When she comes across the check — that’s the bottom line — she’s quite delighted. How come? Because the previous two times the amount had been rather low, and she had begun worrying that this trend was going to continue. The favorable comparison makes her happy. Once again, we have a trivial analogy — I compare what I just got with what I got a short while ago. One would be hard pressed to find a simpler mental act than that, but that doesn’t mean that such elementary comparisons don’t take place all the time, day in, day out, in the life of every human being.
But back to Virginia for a moment. What is her next thought? It’s the following: “What about Susan? How much did she get this time?” Yet another trivial analogy! Now Virginia is comparing herself with a close friend, also a novelist, and with whom Virginia has always felt a vague sense of rivalry of which she is a bit ashamed, but what can she do about that? Wondering about the size of her friend’s royalties is a knee-jerk reflex, and she can’t suppress it. It’s a perfectly normal psychological pressure pushing for a mapping to be made. Obviously she knows that no oracle is going to supply her with the unknown figure, but that doesn’t in the least keep her from wondering about it.
At last, Virginia takes a closer look at her own royalty statement, comparing the amounts that her various novels have brought her this time. Once again, she’s making a series of mini-analogies — I compare the income due to my most recent tale Carnival after Doomsday with the incomes due to my previous books Symphony in Ugly Minor, Hike of the Hellbound, and The Tyranny of Well-behaved Moppets.
There will no doubt be some who will protest that we are not talking about analogies here, but just about simple comparisons between numbers. But in fact it’s a good deal more than just that. These figures are all members of the category royalty amounts, and they all apply to the same novelist, and moreover, they all belong to the same biannual statement. It would never have crossed Virginia’s mind to compare her income from Carnival after Doomsday with a random figure, such as the price of her hairdryer or her county taxes ten years ago, let alone the temperature in Beijing or the number of lions in the local zoo. To be sure, she’s comparing one numerical figure with another one, but she’s doing so because the two figures have a tight conceptual connection and because making this comparison will afford her some kind of insight into her life. It’s undeniably an analogy — an analogy between the royalties brought to her by two of her books — a trivial analogy, admittedly, but no less an analogy for its simplicity or naturalness.
Swimming in a Sea of Analogies
Mark is reading the newspaper. He sees that the swimmer Michael Phelps, shortly after winning his umpteenth gold medal in the Olympics, has just said, “I was hoping to break the world record in this race, but okay, I guess a gold medal isn’t too bad.” Mark asks himself, “Is that guy Phelps arrogant, or what?!” And in order to think about it more clearly, he wonders, “Well, what would I have said if I’d been in his shoes?” Comparison, analogy — no doubt about it. And more generally, in order to relate more deeply to the article he’s reading, Mark imagines, as would any of us, what it would be like to be a world-class swimmer at the tender age of 23, what it would feel like to be there and to participate in all these events, to be madly churning down the final lap and to see one’s own hand touching the wall ahead of all others, to throw one’s arms in the air in jubilation, to receive congratulations from one’s teammates, to hear loud rounds of cheering, and so forth.
This is how we human beings understand such an event — we try to mentally simulate it, inserting ourselves into it by likening it to events that we have known in our lives. Perhaps Mark himself once won a medal long ago; in that case, the memory of that event will jump to mind instantly. Perhaps he never participated in competitive sports but once swam very fast in a friend’s swimming pool, and his friend voiced amazement; he will recall it vividly. Perhaps he was once warmly congratulated by a bunch of his schoolmates; then that memory will come to mind. Perhaps one time in school he was called up to the stage to receive some award, and this lovely souvenir comes back to him. That’s how it goes.
And what if this Mark were Mark Spitz, the American Olympic swimmer who won seven gold medals in the 1972 Olympics in Munich? What would Mark Spitz have been thinking as he was watching Michael Phelps on television during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing? It’s hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have been making scads of analogies. Not surprisingly, in an interview, Mark Spitz said, “Phelps is pretty much my double. He reminds me of myself.”
And what if Michael Phelps were Jewish (as is Spitz), and if he had grown up in the town of Sacramento (as Spitz did)? Well, the analogical link between him and Spitz would have been all the stronger, and that would have made the experience even more intense for Spitz. On the other
hand, if the sensational athlete in Beijing had been a woman who had a chance at winning eight gold medals, the analogy would have been less compelling to the mind of male swimmer Mark Spitz. And if this woman had been Indonesian and if she was shooting for eight gold medals not in swimming but in archery, then Mark Spitz might well have had little or no interest in her quest.
Now why have we taken the trouble to dream up a long set of variations on the theme of Mark Spitz who, at the age of 58, is watching his 23-year-old quasi-double Michael Phelps on television? Our goal was merely to point out once again that human minds are constantly swimming in a sea of comparisons that mostly go unnoticed, and which are all mini-analogies whose experienced intensity is a function of the strength of the analogy. It’s a simple connection: the tighter the analogy, the more strongly it tugs. And what earthly purpose does this nonstop deluge of analogies serve? The flood of analogies sweeping through our brains at all moments is part and parcel of the human condition, and they are manufactured because their presence helps us to put our finger on the essence of the new situations that we confront. Our insatiable compulsion to make comparisons between the brand-new and the previously seen is a necessary prerequisite for staying afloat in a world that is so complex and unpredictable.
Let’s take one last look at the Phelps/Spitz comparison. If this analogy were really all that pointless and vacuous, why would Mark Spitz be thinking about it at all? Why would he be glued to his TV in order to see what will happen to his quasi-double? Why would he say with some nostalgia, “Back in 1972, they didn’t have a 50-meter race as they do now; if it had existed back then, I would probably have won eight gold medals”? And why would journalists from all over the world have gone into a feeding frenzy comparing in great detail the performances of the two Olympians, day after day? Every time someone makes a comparison, no matter how simple-minded or trivial it is, one feels compelled either to reject it or to deepen it. Analogies are addictive!
Surfaces and Essences Page 27