Are Analogies Always Filled with Surprises?
It might be objected that the comparison “Michael Phelps is like Mark Spitz” does not belong to the same family as the analogies listed in our pyramid of analogies at this chapter’s start (“a song is like a drug”; “sexism is like racism”; “dying is like parting”; “wings are like fins”; “an animal’s heart is like a pump”; and so forth). Those in the pyramid would be genuine analogies because each of them reveals something new and unsuspected when one runs into it, whereas “Michael Phelps is like Mark Spitz” is merely the flattest, most anemic of resemblances, having no interest or consequences, almost as if someone said to a friend, “I’m analogous to you, because we both have a head, two arms, and two legs.”
Well, yes — that is, in fact, quite a fine analogy between two people, which, no matter how trivial it may be, can still be perfectly useful. For example, if your ankle is giving you some trouble, and I have already had some ankle problems myself, my advice might be helpful to you. Or if you don’t know how to get an eyelash out of your eye and I have a very reliable trick involving pulling my eyelid down over my eye with my finger, I could teach you that trick and save you some suffering. Or even simpler: If we’ve just taken a hike together and I’m feeling ravenous, I might well suspect that you’re hungry too.
Analogies far simpler than “Michael Phelps is like Mark Spitz” — extremely banal analogies like “I am like you” or “this human being is like other human beings” — pervade our thoughts. At all moments, we depend intimately on such analogies, though in an entirely unconscious fashion. Thus, we see someone in the New York subway take out at a map of New York, unfold it, and study it; we relate, because we, too, have taken out, unfolded, and studied maps of New York (and of Paris and Madrid and Tokyo…; and guide books, and instruction manuals…) hundreds of times. We see someone scratch her elbow; we relate, because we, too, have scratched our elbow (and our knee, and our neck…), thousands of times. We see someone yawn; we relate, because we, too, have yawned tens of thousands of times. These kinds of analogies are certainly not deeply insightful, but they are nonetheless deep, because they lie at the roots of our understanding of other beings — it would be no exaggeration to describe them as the cornerstones of compassion and empathy — and because they determine our style of relating to the world.
Let’s think about the very down-to-earth analogies that link one grocery store to another. The concept grocery store carries a great deal of knowledge within it, such as where bananas are likely to be found. Such knowledge is acquired through the making of analogies and, when needed, it is triggered by analogy. When we say to ourselves, “The bananas ought to be somewhere over there”, the word “there” designates certain familiar aisles in certain familiar grocery stores, yet at the same time it also designates some never-before-seen aisles in the unfamiliar grocery store in which one finds oneself for the first time. If I know where to find the bananas in my usual grocery store, then a “bananalogy” will no doubt help me to find bananas in an unfamiliar grocery store, even one in a foreign country. To be sure, this idea is so lackluster that it hardly feels like an analogy, let alone like a thought of interest or consequence. And yet, for all its lack of luster, it is useful in helping me guess where I can find bananas in a new store.
A crucial aspect of categorization is that it allows us, through analogies that we note, to make guesses or to draw conclusions. These analogies, whatever domain they are in, are based on very familiar categories, such as person, swimmer, athlete, Olympic champion, swimming legend, grocery store, aisle, banana, and so on. Without such categories, all thought would come to a crashing halt. Indeed, everyone, at every moment, is betting their very life on the validity of an enormous number of trivial, unconscious analogies whose existence they never suspect at all. Every act of thinking, no matter how small, relies on such analogies, and the tighter the analogy, the more unavoidable the conclusions it leads to would seem to be.
Creatures that Live Thanks to the Efficient Triggering of Memories
George has just heard the sad news that his best friend’s father has died of a heart attack. Reflexively, he recalls the unexpected death of his own father several years earlier. And again involuntarily, the recent sudden death of the woman who lived on the same floor of his apartment building flashes to mind. He recalls the time six years earlier, when he himself had to be taken to the emergency room because he was experiencing irregular heartbeats. He recalls the only time when he saw his best friend weeping, and how much that sight had moved him. He remembers how profoundly the death of an old aunt had devastated her husband, and he tries to put himself in the place of his friend’s mother at this terrible time… In short, a flurry of analogies comes rushing helter-skelter into George’s head.
That evening, George calls up his thesis advisor and says, “My best friend’s father died last night, and I’m going to have to be away for a few days for the funeral.” His advisor wistfully replies, “Ah, I understand… You know, our old cat died last week. My wife and I are very sad.” This is yet another analogy, and you might well find it in bad taste — and yet if your cat, a cat you’d had for nearly twenty years, had just died, and if someone had phoned you to tell you that a close friend of theirs had just died, wouldn’t your cat’s demise inevitably spring to mind? Sensitivity to the other person’s feelings would almost certainly keep you from mentioning it, but it would not prevent such remindings from occurring silently in the privacy of your head. Moreover, this whole paragraph is tacitly relying on yet another analogy — namely, the comparison between how you would act in this situation and how George’s thesis advisor acted. Although that comparison is just a routine, mundane act of alignment, it is nonetheless important to you, because it’s helping you figure out how you feel about a situation you’ve just encountered. Are analogies not, indeed, irresistible and unsuppressible?
In a very large exotic airport at four in the morning when it’s swelteringly hot and you’re hemmed in by several hundred noisy people who, all anxious to get through customs (or better yet, to sneak through) as fast as possible, have established mysteriously fluid line-like filaments that go way beyond the boundaries of the familiar category labeled “line”, and in which people left and right are cutting in and elbowing others, and in which quite a few people can be seen heading down passages that look illegal (hard to say where they go), and where you don’t know a single word of the language (or are there several languages here?), and where you have in your three suitcases (one of which hasn’t yet shown up despite over an hour’s wait, and another of which arrived without its handle, and the third of which lost one of its wheels) a wide variety of quite valuable objects — well, in this unfamiliar situation, it won’t be so easy to lean on one’s rich and usually trustworthy repertoire of familiar and comforting categories as one tries to decide how to behave among all these elbowers, line-cutters, and customs agents!
What is the conceptually closest situation from your past, and at what level of detail? How do you strip this complex situation down to its most essential details to see right to its heart, in the way that a local would do effortlessly? For natives, knowing what to do in this situation is the most natural thing in the world; they’re at home, and it’s simple. For a visiting traveler, though, even if this scenario were to evoke a few situations that have been experienced first-hand, it probably wouldn’t bring to mind any category that would seem very promising and thus very comforting — no helpful haven of a memory would spring to mind. In this kind of situation, one has to be satisfied with behaviors suggested by memories that are less strongly analogous and which, for that reason, cannot give such precise and reliable tips. It’s too bad, but this, too, is a frequent part of life.
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 i
n 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.
Danny and Dick, Canyon and Karnak: A Canonical Reminding
Reminding is a profound mystery, as the following case shows.
Doug and Carol arrive with their son Danny, fifteen months old, at the Grand Canyon’s North Rim. While his parents are captivated by the huge chasm, Danny is riveted by a few ants and a leaf on the sandy ground, fifty feet from the canyon’s edge. For a moment Doug is surprised, but then he realizes that such a young child is unable to appreciate entities of dimensions greater than ten or twenty feet, let alone miles (and the Grand Canyon is many miles wide). Although his infant son’s reaction now makes perfect sense, Doug cannot suppress a smile at the irony of the situation.
Fast-forward roughly fifteen years. Doug and his two children get off their cruise ship on the Nile in the city of Luxor. They are with their friends Kellie and Dick, and the whole group sets off on foot for the famed Temple of Karnak. While the other visitors are soon absorbed by the splendor of the great columns that surround them and by the erudition of their guide, Dick is irresistibly drawn to a few bottlecaps he spots lying in the dirt, and he leans down with joy to pick them up, thereby augmenting a modest collection that he’d started when they landed in Egypt just a few days earlier.
This act, reflecting Dick’s fascination with rusty knickknacks on the ground as opposed to the splendor of the ancient ruins soaring above, reminds Doug of something far back in his past: the time when his tiny son was engrossed by a handful of insects scuttling about on the ground rather than by the awesome sights surrounding him.
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?
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