Extended Metaphor Quotes

When I return to the world, I will be a man. I will walk among you. I will lick my lips with my small, dexterous tongue. I will shake hands with other men, grasping firmly with my opposable thumbs. And I will teach all people that I know. And when I see a man or a woman or a child in trouble, I will extend my hand, both metaphorically and physically. I will offer my hand. To him. To her. To you. To the world. I will be a good citizen, a good partner in the endeavour of life that we all share.

What's this?" he inquired, none too pleasantly. "A circus?" "No, Julius. It's the end of the circus." "I see. And these are the clowns?" Foaly's head poked through the doorway. "Pardon me for interrupting your extended circus metaphor, but what the hell is that?

It never takes longer than a few minutes, when they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That's what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.

It's at moments like these in a game that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineffectual, stupid—and morally so. The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every error he makes is so profoundly, so irritatingly typical of himself, instantly familiar, like a signature, like a tissue scar or some deformation in a private place.

Now, before I extend this metaphor, let me make a distinction between career and creativity. Creativity is connected to your passion, that light inside you that drives you. That joy that comes when you do something you love. That small voice that tells you, “I like this. Do this again. You are good at it. Keep going.” That is the juicy stuff that lubricates our lives and helps us feel less alone in the world. Your creativity is not a bad boyfriend. It is a really warm older Hispanic lady who has a beautiful laugh and loves to hug. If you are even a little bit nice to her she will make you feel great and maybe cook you delicious food.

He holds Willem so close that he can feel muscles from his back to his fingertips come alive, so close that he can feel Willem's heart beating against his, can feel his rib cage against his, and his stomach deflating and inflating with air. 'Harder,' Willem tells him, and he does until his arms grow first fatigued and then numb, until his body is sagging with tiredness, until he feels that he really is falling: first through the mattress, and then the bed frame, and then the floor itself, until he is sinking in slow motion through all the floors of the building, which yield and swallow him like jelly. Down he goes through the fifth floor, where Richard's family is now storing stacks of Moroccan tiles, down through the fourth floor, which is empty, down through Richard and India's apartment, and Richard's studio, and then to the ground floor, and into the pool, and then down and down, farther and farther, past the subway tunnels, past bedrock and silt, through underground lakes and oceans of oil, through layers of fossil and shale, until he is drifting into the fire at the earth's core. And the entire time, Willem is wrapped around him, and as they enter the fire, they aren't burned but melted into one being, their legs and chests and arms and heads fusing into one.

We are not great connoisseurs of the two twilights. We miss the dawning, exclusably enough, by sleeping through it, and are as much strangers to the shadowless welling-up of day as to the hesitant return of consciousness in our slowly waking selves. But our obliviousness to evening twilight is less understandable. Why do we almost daily ignore a spectacle (and I do not mean sunset but rather the hour, more or less, afterward) that has a thousand tonalities, that alters and extends reality, that offers, more beautifully than anything man-made, a visual metaphor or peace? To say that it catches us at busy or tired moments won't do; for in temperate latitudes it varies by hours from solstice to solstice. Instead I suspect that we shun twilight because if offers two things which, as insecurely rational beings, we would rather not appreciate: the vision of irrevocable cosmic change (indeed, change into darkness), and a sense of deep ambiguity—of objects seeming to be more, less, other than we think them to be. We are noontime and midnight people, and such devoted camp-followers of certainly that we cannot endure seeing it mocked and undermined by nature. There is a brief period of twilight of which I am especially fond, little more than a moment, when I see what seems to be color without light, followed by another brief period of light without color. The earlier period, like a dawn of night, calls up such sights as at all other times are hidden, wistful half-formless presences neither of day nor night, that draw up with them similar presences in the mind.

She has never been in the presence, before, of two people who are in love with each other. She feels like a stray child, ragged and cold, with her nose pressed to a lighted window. A toy-store window, a bakery window, with fancy cakes and decorated cookies. Poverty prevents her entrance. These things are for other people; nothing for her.

point the way,’ he was talking in metaphorical terms. This pointing-hand gesture—with its index finger and thumb extended upward—is a well-known symbol of the Ancient Mysteries, and it appears

In serious Victorian fiction, as in Shakespearian tragedy, melodrama normally functions as metaphor. The author finds a vivid equivalent for a reality too elaborate or too extended to be briefly depicted.

Let me use a second metaphor. Imagine that you found a tangle of seaweed on the edge of the shore and lifted it. The heaviest parts rest on the sand in a mesh, but some skeins extend vertically. This neural network is shaped like that: it looks like a tangled skein of a hundred thousand golden threads that has been drawn upward. The mass of it gathers in the pelvis, but strands from the same network extend upward to the spinal cord and brain.

Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on the MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on.

In the Garden of Eden, Eve wore a fig leaf, not to cover her moist parts, but to draw Adam’s gaze to what lay hidden in the undergrowth. Extending the metaphor, the snake symbolizes Adam’s tongue, the apple the rosy, blood-engorged bundle of nerve endings pulsing within Eve’s clitoris.

Underground Airlines is a figure of speech: it's the root of a grand, extended metaphor, "pilots" and "stewards" and "baggage handlers" and "gate agents." Connecting flights and airport security. The Airlines flies on the ground, in package trucks and unmarked vans and stolen tractor-trailers. It flies in the illicit adjustment of numbers on packing slips, in the suborning of plantation guards and the bribing of border security agents, in the small arts of persuasion: by threat or cashier's check or blow job. The Airlines is orders placed by imaginary corporations for unneeded items to be shipped to such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time.

In attempting to say who Jesus is, the best we can do is to utter words provoked by the collective attempts to do so over the centuries-- a choral work we cannot possibly translate back into a few phrases, any more than we can assume that a concert is adequately described by its listing in the program, or that a painting is interchangeable with its title. Reading the program or the museum's catalogue, we have no notion of what actually was performed or displayed. We can extend the metaphor: a literal reading of the Bible amounts to little more than what we learn from a concert program, or even the score. It is the symphonic whole that bears the meaning that nothing less can remotely capture.

The whole purpose of our search for a ‘unit of selection’ is to discover a suitable actor to play the leading role in our metaphors of purpose.

Though some are more able “gatherers”—that is, some are better at making money than others—the money you earn is a gift of God. Therefore, the money you make must be shared to build up community. So wealthier believers must share with poorer ones, not only within a congregation but also across congregations and borders. (See 2 Corinthians 8:15 and its context.) To extend the metaphor—money that is hoarded for oneself rots the soul.

I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate's way—even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications.

Like Michelangelo spending eight months in the mountains of Carrara, selecting the most perfect blocks of marble for the tomb of Pope Julius II, Françoise, who attached extreme importance to the inherent quality of the materials out of which her masterpieces were to be wrought, had been down to Les Halles in person more than once to choose the finest slabs of rump steak, the best shin of beef and calf’s foot. She threw herself so strenuously into this pursuit that my mother, seeing our old servant turn red in the face, feared that, as the sculptor of the Medici tombs had sickened in the quarries at Pietrasanta, she might make herself ill from overwork. (p. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 17)

It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father's guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader.

I was a vase. The thought struck her as she gazed at the wall of them. She had been a vessel; it was true. She'd stepped into this shop, introduced herself, asked for a job, hoped it would fill her. And then, sitting with Jacob at the community table, she'd been a flower. Snipped from the root, quick to wilt, temporary. She'd existed to be lovely and to be chosen. No one had expected her to last. But she hadn't been a flower when she'd gone to live with Claire, had she? Emilie traveled deeper into the shop. She was in the addition now, its ceiling higher, its rows of tables laden with houseplants. Water, she decided. That's what she'd been with Claire. Shapeless, colorless, but necessary. She'd done what she had to. She had been there for her grandmother. She'd kept her family afloat. But what was she now?

The rhythm of the heart...beats twice. Thump, thump. Once, first for itself and then once again for the rest of the body. It's a true metaphor for us. Like the heart we must pump life giving love and care for ourselves first, before extending that gift out to others. The heartbeat of every worthwhile relationship begins with a healthy, humble understanding and appreciation of our own personal self worth. When we do this the power to truly love and appreciate others pulsates fluidly and freely into all those we warmly choose to share our lives with.

The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent’s greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child’s own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing—as every parent fears—that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father’s guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader.

A DNA molecule in the germ-line of an individual who happens to die young, or who otherwise fails to reproduce, should not be called a dead-end replicator. Such germ-lines are, as it turns out, terminal. They fail in what may metaphorically be called their aspiration to immortality. Differential failure of this kind is what we mean by natural selection.

5.4 The question of accumulation. If life is a wager, what form does it take? At the racetrack, an accumulator is a bet which rolls on profits from the success of one of the horse to engross the stake on the next one. 5.5 So a) To what extent might human relationships be expressed in a mathematical or logical formula? And b) If so, what signs might be placed between the integers?Plus and minus, self-evidently; sometimes multiplication, and yes, division. But these sings are limited. Thus an entirely failed relationship might be expressed in terms of both loss/minus and division/ reduction, showing a total of zero; whereas an entirely successful one can be represented by both addition and multiplication. But what of most relationships? Do they not require to be expressed in notations which are logically improbable and mathematically insoluble? 5.6 Thus how might you express an accumulation containing the integers b, b, a (to the first), a (to the second), s, v? B = s - v (*/+) a (to the first) Or a (to the second) + v + a (to the first) x s = b 5.7 Or is that the wrong way to put the question and express the accumulation? Is the application of logic to the human condition in and of itself self-defeating? What becomes of a chain of argument when the links are made of different metals, each with a separate frangibility? 5.8 Or is "link" a false metaphor? 5.9 But allowing that is not, if a link breaks, wherein lies the responsibility for such breaking? On the links immediately on the other side, or on the whole chain? But what do you mean by "the whole chain"? How far do the limits of responsibility extend? 6.0 Or we might try to draw the responsibility more narrowly and apportion it more exactly. And not use equations and integers but instead express matters in the traditional narrative terminology. So, for instance, if...." - Adrian Finn

Penemue’s thing was knowing all that was written. That included the abstract, metaphorical writing of one’s deeds on their soul. And with Penemue’s perfect memory it meant he could tell you everything about you, your parents, your extended family and all your relatives going back to the beginning of time with an eerie precision. Sadly, Penemue’s thing tended to freak the hell out of people. 

Samadhi without a seed takes the concentration to an even more extreme level. In this state, awareness flows so completely onto the object of concentration that there is no time to fixate that object as something rigid, opaque, and extended in time and space. In other words, the object of concentration ceases to be an object, ceases to be a something. To draw a metaphor from modern physics, the object ceases to be a particle and becomes a wave. That waveform fills our consciousness, and we become that waveform, and we are that wave. As we merge with the wave, it links to all the other waves in the universe. Then the wave dies away into deeply fulfilling nothingness. Observer and observed both disappear. This is samadhi without a seed: a direct abiding at the Still Point of the turning world.

I buckle my sword sheath to my waist and head for the trees. “If you’re coming, hurry up.” They glance at each other, but follow. Aithinne matches my stride, looking askance at me. “You don’t even know where you’re going, do you? You’re not walking into a fight, you’re running into it at full speed with a blindfold on and your ears lopped off and—” “Thank you,” I say. “That metaphor did not need to be extended

This uncovered a number of basic features of our thought processes: that the mind deploys a set of rival frames that can construe even the most plodding everyday event in more than one way; that a frame for thinking about a change of location in real space can be metaphorically extended to conceptualize a change of state as motion in state-space; and that when the mind conceives of an entity as being somewhere or going somewhere, it tends to melt it down to a holistic blob.

Open a dictionary at random; metaphors fill every page. Take the word "fathom." for example. The meaning is clear. A fathom is a measurement of water depth, equivalent to about six feet. But fathom also means "to understand." Why? Scrabble around in the word's etymological roots. "Fathom comes from the Anglo-Saxon faethm, meaning "the two arms outstretched." The term was originally used as a measurement of cloth, because the distance from fingertip to fingertip for the average man with his arms outsretched is roughly six feet. This technique was later extended to sounding the depths of bodies of water, since it was easy to lower a cord divided into six-foot increments, or fathoms, over the side of a boat. But how did fathom come to mean "to understand," as in "I can't fathom that" or "She's unfathomable"? Metaphorically, of course. You master something- you learn to control or accept it-when you embrace it, when you get your arms around it, when you take it in hand. You comprehend something when you grasp it, take its measure, get to the bottom of it-fathom it. Fathom took on its present significance in classic Aristotelian fashion: through the metaphorical transfer of its original meaning (a measurement of cloth or water) to an abstract concept (understanding). This is the primary purpose of metaphor: to carry over existing names or descriptions to things that are either so new that they haven't yet been named or so abstract that they cannot be otherwise explained.

The ‘one-drop rule’ was the foundation of slavery and miscegenation laws in many states, literally used to determine the legal status of individuals, whether they would be enslaved or free. Its logic extended from the notorious three-fifths compromise in the Constitution, which computed slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of counting the population when apportioning representation to government. Slaves could not, of course, vote; but white slave owners wanted them to count as part of the population so that their states could send more representatives to government, surely one of the more outrageous instances of having it both ways in human history. America was a nation long accustomed to quantifying people in terms of ethnic and racial composition, as words like mulatto and half-caste, quadroon and octoroon, make clear. Declaring someone ‘one hundred per cent American’ was no mere metaphor in a country that measured people in percentages and fractions, in order to deny some of them full humanity.

Between land and sea the mist was like a veil This is a simile. Such links as "like" or "as" are typical of the simile: one object is like another object. If you go on to say the mist was like the veil of a bride, this is a sustained simile with elements of mild poetry; but if you say, the mist was like the veil of a fat bride whose father was even fatter and wore a wig, this is a rambling simile, marred by an illogical continuation, of the kind Homer used for purposes of epic narration and Gogol used for grotesque dream-effects.

To extend the digital metaphor, both rivals must also reconsider the fitness of their apps for the twenty-first century. In his book Civilization, Niall Ferguson identifies six 'killer apps' - ideas and institutions that drove the extraordinary divergence in prosperity between the West and the rest of the world after 1500. These are competition, the scientific revolution, property rights, modern medicine, consumer society, and work ethic. While noting China's great reconvergence with the West since 1970, Niall wonders if China can sustain its progress without killer app number three: secure private property rights. I worry that the American work ethic has lapsed into mediocrity, while its consumer society has become decadent.

[Henry James'] essay's closing lines can either be read neutrally or as a more purposeful wish that this mystery [of Shakespeare's authorship] will one day be resolved by the 'criticism of the future': 'The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there ... May it not then be but a question, for the fullness of time, of the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge?' Is Shakespeare hinting here that one day critics will hit upon another, more suitable candidate, identify the individual in whom the man and artist converge and are 'one'? If so, his choice of metaphor - recalling Hamlet's lunge at the arras in the closet scene - is fortunate. Could James have forgotten that the sharp point of Hamlet's weapon finds the wrong man?

The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode. This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors listed above, only four besides Tolkien would find their works regularly placed on the ‘fantasy’ shelves of bookshops, and ‘the fantastic’ includes many genres besides fantasy: allegory and parable, fairy-tale, horror and science fiction, modern ghost-story and medieval romance. Nevertheless, the point remains. Those authors of the twentieth century who have spoken most powerfully to and for their contemporaries have for some reason found it necessary to use the metaphoric mode of fantasy, to write about worlds and creatures which we know do not exist, whether Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’, Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’, the remote islands of Golding and Wells, or the Martians and Tralfa-madorians who burst into peaceful English or American suburbia in Wells and Vonnegut. A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy – should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened.

Mendel Kaelen, a Dutch postdoc in the Imperial lab, proposes a more extended snow metaphor: “Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow, and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill. As one sled after another goes down the hill, a small number of main trails will appear in the snow. And every time a new sled goes down, it will be drawn into the preexisting trails, almost like a magnet.” Those main trails represent the most well-traveled neural connections in your brain, many of them passing through the default mode network. “In time, it becomes more and more difficult to glide down the hill on any other path or in a different direction. “Think of psychedelics as temporarily flattening the snow. The deeply worn trails disappear, and suddenly the sled can go in other directions, exploring new landscapes and, literally, creating new pathways.” When the snow is freshest, the mind is most impressionable, and the slightest nudge—whether from a song or an intention or a therapist’s suggestion—can powerfully influence its future course. Robin Carhart-Harris’s theory of

For almost all astronomical objects, gravitation dominates, and they have the same unexpected behavior. Gravitation reverses the usual relation between energy and temperature. In the domain of astronomy, when heat flows from hotter to cooler objects, the hot objects get hotter and the cool objects get cooler. As a result, temperature differences in the astronomical universe tend to increase rather than decrease as time goes on. There is no final state of uniform temperature, and there is no heat death. Gravitation gives us a universe hospitable to life. Information and order can continue to grow for billions of years in the future, as they have evidently grown in the past. The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists. Scientists find the vision attractive, since it gives them a purpose for their existence and an unending supply of jobs. The vision is less attractive to artists and writers and ordinary people. Ordinary people are more interested in friends and family than in science. Ordinary people may not welcome a future spent swimming in an unending flood of information. A darker view of the information-dominated universe was described in the famous story “The Library of Babel,” written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941.§ Borges imagined his library, with an infinite array of books and shelves and mirrors, as a metaphor for the universe. Gleick’s book has an epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning,” expressing the concerns of people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture. The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information. Gleick ends his book with Borges’s image of the human condition: We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

.....the discourse of the Qur’an-e-Sharif, rich in parable and allegory, metaphor and symbol, has been an inexhaustible well-spring of inspiration, lending itself to a wide spectrum of interpretations. This freedom of interpretation is a generosity which the Qur'an confers upon all believers, uniting them in the conviction that All-Merciful Allah will forgive them if they err in their sincere attempts to understand His word. Happily, as a result, the Holy Book continues to guide and illuminate the thought and conduct of Muslims belonging to different communities of interpretation and spiritual affiliation, from century to century, in diverse cultural environments. The Noble Qur’an extends its principle of pluralism also to adherents of other faiths. It affirms that each has a direction and path to which they turn so that all should strive for good works, in the belief that, wheresoever they may be, Allah will bring them together. - His Highness the Aga Khan, The Ismaili Center London, October 19, 2003 ‘Word of God, Art of Man: The Qur’an and its Creative Expressions’ An International Colloquium organised by Institute of Ismaili Studies

Sages throughout history have relished the enigma that pleasure is undefined without suffering. In the words of Carl Jung: “There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” The Tao Te Ching extends the metaphor: “Difficult and easy accomplish each other, long and short form each other, high and low distinguish each other.

The table metaphor in Christian theology is rich and multivalent. Tables are where enemies become friends. Tables are where dividing walls of hostility are town down. Tables are where generosity is extended toward those who were otherwise excluded. Christians behold God’s generosity at the Lord’s Table, and extend this generosity toward outsiders with their own tables. 

If democracy seems to work, and if people receive a consistent, reliable, and meaningful response from others when they communicate their opinions and feelings about shared experiences, they begin to assume that self-expression in democracy matters. When they can communicate with others regularly, in ways that produce meaningful changes, they learn that democracy matters. If they receive responses that seem to be substantive but actually are not, citizens begin to feel as if they were being manipulated. If the messages they receive from the media feed this growing cynicism, the decline of democracy can be accelerated. Moreover, if citizens of a country express their opinions and feelings over an extended period of time without evoking a meaningful response, then they naturally begin to feel angry. If the flow of communication provides little opportunity for citizens to express themselves meaningfully, they naturally begin to feel frustration and powerlessness. This has happened all too often to minority communities who suffer prejudice and are not given a fair hearing by the majority for complaints. My generation learned in our youth to expect that democracy would work. Our frustration with the ineptitude and moral insensitivity of our national leaders in the last several years is balanced by the knowledge we gained in an earlier time and is influenced by the basic posture we adopted during our first experiences as citizens. Although many in my generation became disillusioned with self-government, most of us still believe that democracy works—or can work—and that communication and participation are the keys to making it work well. In the United States of America, the torch of democracy—to use John F. Kennedy’s metaphor—is regularly passed from one generation to the next. But what happens if the torch is passed to a generation that has learned to adopt a different posture toward democracy and to assume that their opinions are not likely to evoke an appropriate, much less consistent, response from the broader community? Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out on whether American democracy actually works or not. In contemporary America, we have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of incredibly talented and resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Compare this with when our country was founded and only a handful of people had the modern equivalent of a college education—but when so many were vitally engaged in the historic task of bringing forth into the world an ingenious republic that embodied a new form of representative democracy.

Reading is a discontinuous and fragmentary operation. Or rather, the object of reading is punctiform and pulviscular material. In the spreading expanse of the writing, the reader’s attention isolates some minimal segments, juxtapositions of words, metaphors, syntactic nexuses, logical passages, lexical peculiarities that prove to possess an extremely concentrated density of meaning. They are like elemental particles making up the work’s nucleus, around which all the rest revolves or else like the void at the bottom of a vortex which sucks in and swallows currents. It is through these apertures that, in barely perceptible flashes, the truth the book may bear is revealed, its ultimate substance. Myth and mysteries consist of impalpable little granules like the pollen that sticks to a butterfly’s legs, only those who have realized this can expect revelations and illuminations. This is why my attention, in contrast to what you, sir, were saying, cannot be detached from the written lines even for an instant. I must not be distracted if I do not wish to miss some valuable clue. Every time I come upon one of these clumps of meaning I must go on digging around to see if the nugget extends into a vein. This is why my reading has no end. I read and reread, each time seeking the confirmation of a new discovery among the folds of the sentences.

Holy Spirit” can be described with these three profound metaphors that I believe characterize New Testament theologizing: (1) Ultimate Trust in the trustworthiness of the Final Mystery; (2) Universal Love, a “care” that extends to all beings, both enemies and friends; and (3) Profound Freedom from our personality, our self-image, and our fate.

Because faggots of wood kept a fire going, the word was extended metaphorically to being burnt at the stake.

When sexual liberation was the order of the day, the watchword was 'Maximize sexuality, minimize reproduction' . The dream of our present cloneloving society is just the opposite: as much reproduction and as little sex as possible. At one time the body was a metaphor for the soul, then it became a metaphor for sex. Today it is no longer a metaphor for anything at all, merely the locus of metastasis, of the machine-like connections between all its processes, of an endless programming devoid of any symbolic organization or overarching purpose: the body is thus given over to the pure promiscuity of its relationship to itself - the same promiscuity that characterizes networks and integrated circuits. The possibility of metaphor is disappearing in every sphere. This is an aspect of a general tendency towards transsexuality which extends well beyond sex, affecting all disciplines as they lose their specificity and partake of a process of confusion and contagion - a viral loss of determinacy which is the prime event among all the new events that assail us. Economics becomes transeconomics, aesthetics becomes transaesthetics, sex becomes transsexuality - all converge in a transversal and universal process wherein no discourse may have a metaphorical relationship to another, because for there to be metaphor, differential fields and distinct objects must exist. But they cannot exist where contamination is possible between any discipline and any other. Total metonymy, then - viral by definition (or lack of definition). The viral analogy is not an importation from biology, for everything is affected simultaneously and under the same terms by the virulence in question, by the chain reaction we have been discussing, by haphazard and senseless proliferation and metastasis. Perhaps our melancholy stems from this, for metaphor still had its beauty; it was aesthetic, playing as it did upon difference, and upon the illusion of difference. Today, metonymy - replacing the whole as well as the components, and occasioning a general commutability of terms - has built its house upon the dis-illusion of metaphor.

Mendel Kaelen, a Dutch post-doc in the Imperial lab, proposes a more extended snow metaphor. “Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow”, he told me, “and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill. As one sled after another goes down the hill, a small number of main trails will appear in the snow. And every time a new sled goes down it will be drawn into the pre-existing trails, almost like a magnet. Those main trails represent the most traveled neural connections in your brain, many of them passing through the default mode network.” “In time,” he says, “it becomes more and more difficult to glide down the hill on any other path or in a different direction. Think of psychedelics as temporarily flattening the snow. The deeply worn trails disappear and suddenly the sled can go in other directions, exploring new landscapes and literally creating new pathways. When the snow is freshest the mind is most impressionable and the slightest nudge, whether from a song or an intention or a therapist’s suggestion can powerfully influence its future course.

Polman and his colleagues also tested the generative effect of enacting another metaphor: the use of the phrase “on one hand . . . on the other hand” to convey the consideration of multiple possibilities. This time, participants were asked to come up with novel uses for a new campus building complex; half of them were asked to hold one hand outstretched as they engaged in brainstorming, while the others were instructed to alternate holding out one hand and then the other. The study subjects who (unwittingly) acted out the metaphor “on the one hand . . . on the other hand” generated nearly 50 percent more potential uses for the building, and independent judges rated their ideas as more varied and more creative.

Our metaphorical awareness of time is complicated by the fact that our lives seem to extend backward against its grain. We naturally associate the past- the old - with our youth, and the young future with our old age. Thus we have trouble integrating psychological identity with the encompassing process of nature and history.

if spiritual forces operate in a different sphere to the rule of law and human rights, then democratic politics is failing to deal with a fundamental problem in people’s lives and after-lives. the repercussions of AIDS for the moral cosmology are profound indeed. the secular frameworks of epidemiology and public policy will not by themselves be enough to make sense of the virus and epidemic. we need to develop and deploy metaphors that speak to the social world, constructed around moral imaginings which are impacted by AIDS and which in turn constrain social capabilities to respond to AIDS. we should also be alert to the fact that scholars and policy makers themselves are unable to think about the crisis that is AIDS without using language and imagery borrowed from another realm of human experience. how we think about the AIDS epidemic becomes its own reality. yet we must not lose sight of the virus and the disease. (…) AIDS represents the ordinary workings of biology, not an irrational or diabolical plague with moral meaning. HIV transmission is preventable and medication is available that can extend a healthy life for those living with HIV. science can triumph, given resources, policies and the right social and political context.

It could be as straightforward as the notion of a "mental reboot"- Matt Johnson's biological control-alt-delete key- that jolts the brain out of destructive patterns (such as Kessler's "capture"), affording an opportunity for new patterns to take root. It could be that, as Franz Vollenweider has hypothesized, psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity. The myriad new connections that spring up in the brain during the psychedelic experience, as mapped by the neuroimaging done at Imperial College, and the disintegration of well traveled old connections, may serve simply to "shake the snow globe," in Robin Carhart-Harris's phrase, a predicate for establishing new pathways. Mendel Kaelen, a Dutch postdoc in the Imperial lab, proposes a more extended snow metaphor: "Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow, and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill. As one sled after another goes down the hill, a small number of main trails will appear in the snow. And every time a new sled goes down, it will be drawn into the preexisting trails, almost like a magnet." Those main trails represent the most well-traveled neural connections in your brain, many of them passing through the default mode network. "In time, it become more and more difficult to glide down the hill on any other path or in a different direction. "Think of psychedelics as temporarily flattening the snow. The deeply worn trails disappear, and suddenly the sled can go in other directions, exploring new landscapes and, literally, creating new pathways." When the snow is freshest, the mind is most impressionable, and the slightest nudge-whether from a song or an intention or a therapists's suggestion- can powerfully influence its future course. p384

Psalm 23: The Divine Patron and Host This popular hymn speaks about God’s generous and honoring patronage. David uses two commons metaphors to convey God’s protection and provision for his people—God is both a shepherd and a host. These images worshipfully visualize Yahweh’s patron-client relationship with Israel. God is faithful to always favor Israel with benevolence. My patron is Yahweh. He generously provides for my every need. He gifts me the finest. He brings me to the best places. His perfect care delights my heart. He gives wise guidance so that I’m never lost. This lavish generosity makes his name great.1–3 Even when the clouds of shame and despair gather, I do not worry, because you, O God, have my back. Your strong hand gives me complete assurance.4 You welcome me to a lavish banquet, so everyone sees I’m your honored guest. You exalt me to prominence; your favor towards me reaches to the heavens. Without any doubt, you faithfully provide for me every day. You always extend hospitality and honor me with your presence.5–6

Extending this metaphor to organizations, it’s not sufficient to just have diverse people on a team—it’s also important to recognize and utilize the unique capabilities that they bring to the table.

Remembering the words of her abuela, she reminded herself to always extend a hand, either physical or metaphorical, even toward those who recede.

The numerous commentaries that have been made on Baudelaire's "correspondences" seem to have forgotten this sixth sense that seeks to model and modulate the voice. This delicate little Aeolian harp that natures has set at the entrance to our breathing is really a sixth sense, which followed and surpassed the others. It quivers at the merest movement of metaphor; it permits human thought to sing. And when I let my nonconformist philosopher's daydreams go unchecked, I begin to think that the vowel a is the vowel of immensity. It is a sound area that starts with a sigh and extends beyond all limits.

COULMIER - He who lives in darkness cowers in the light, while he who lives in the sun radiates it. Step into the light for a while, Marquis. THE MARQUIS - Permit me to extend your metaphor. COULMIER - Be my guest. THE MARQUIS - He who sits in the sun is often blinded by it. Then, vulnerable and incognizant, he is devoured by the forces of darkness. Better to stare the fuckers in the face, yes?

Extended metaphor is like a carton of milk without an expiration date.

Others have argued that moral virtue in and by itself will naturally bring happiness in its train. Plato, for instance, argues that the moral integrity of the virtuous individual constitutes a sort of inner harmony, which he contrasts with the disharmony exhibited by the wicked. Since a person cannot fail, at some level, to experience this internal condition, the virtuous will be fundamentally content, while those who lack virtue will be unavoidably dissatisfied. Plato’s conclusion is endorsed by most of the classical thinkers who came after him. The Stoics in particular insistently emphasize the supreme importance of moral virtue over all other good things. Thus Marcus Aurelius, echoing Socrates, insists that the only real harm one can ever suffer is harm to one’s character,1 while Seneca asserts that “virtue per se is sufficient for a happy life.”2 Hard-bitten cynics may think it easy to dismiss all this as a kind of wishful thinking. But in fact this view—that good people should nearly always be considered more fortunate than those who lack the moral virtues—is very plausible. Compare two people: Jill, who genuinely feels pleasure at a colleague’s success, and Jane, who feels intense pleasure at a colleague’s failure. Who would you prefer to be? Most of us will of course opt to be Jill. An obvious reason for this is that we view her as the nicer person. But what if we put aside moral considerations? We grant that Jill is the more admirable person, but who do we think it is pleasanter to be? Plato’s thinking suggests that Jill’s condition is also the more enviable. One obvious reason is that, being a nicer person, she is likely to have more friends, to have better friends, to be more confident of their affection, and to enjoy relationships not sullied by resentment. But a subtler reason, not so easy to articulate, is that Jill’s generous-spirited pleasure in another person’s good fortune is superior to—and not just in moral terms—the mean-spirited enjoyment of a colleague’s failure. Of course, it is not easy to abstract this sense of nonmoral superiority from its moral trappings. It is not a matter of the intensity or duration of the pleasure. But it is perhaps captured fairly well by Plato’s metaphor of inner harmony, a metaphor that extends beyond any particular moment of pleasure to take in the person’s total experience. Self-centered, cruel, mean-spirited individuals are never at ease with—in harmony with—themselves or the world, which is why they can never achieve lasting contentment. Generous spirits, by contrast, experience less conflict between what they in fact feel and what at least some part of them thinks they should feel; furthermore, there is less disharmony between what they experience as their inner reality and the way they present themselves to the world.

Nevertheless, in constructing machines, it is often very important for us to extend to them certain human attributes which are not found among the lower members of the animal community. If the reader wishes to conceive this as a metaphoric extension of our human personalities, he is welcome to do so; but he should be cautioned that the new machines will not stop working as soon as we have stopped giving them human support.

Long before the Gorgon Medusa constellated within the archaic Greek world and was demonized as ugly and ultimately monstrous—with her tongue lolling between sharp fangs, with writhing serpents for hair and glaring eyes—the roots of her multi-layered iconography extended deep into pre-Greek cultures. The earliest agrarian societies of Southeastern Europe, from the 7th-4th millennia BCE, were intimately bonded with the seasonal realities of the living Earth. These egalitarian farmers who developed long-lived, sustainable societies understood that life feeds on life. Death and decomposition are inevitable consequences of being alive, and the nutrients released from previously living matter are essential for life's renewal. Within this context, concepts of the sacred are analogous to the cyclic continuity of all existence. In mythic terms, the Great Goddess, as the Sacred Source of all life, is a metaphor for life giving birth to itself and absorbing itself in death. Therefore, the Goddess of Life is also the Goddess of Death who is responsible for regeneration. Goddesses in various guises who represent this eternal cycle are found in ancient traditions throughout the world. The nature of every society is shaped by prevailing attitudes—honoring and respectful, or fearful.

The sages say that the reason we are born into a body in the physical world is to evolve and grow, to acquire maturity and wisdom. To use a metaphor from physics, when we’re embodied, we’re like a photon in a particle state; while in the invisible world, we’re like a photon in a field state. The particle state is our “local” nature—flesh and blood, sitting on a couch reading. The field state is our “nonlocal” nature, in which we extend to the farthest reaches of the universe and are at one with all things. When we die and leave this body behind, we return to our nonlocal nature, to our field state, to invisible Oneness. But the sages of old learned to experience their field without dying—to taste Oneness while still in the world.

allegory (which is an extended metaphor or image),

This prowess with extended metaphor, which has made his fiction so memorable, the best of it so enduring, is on display here throughout. Sometimes you’ll see three or four of them big motherfuckers on the same page!

You must be able to say the sentences you write. And so they cannot be long and serpentine things that curl around clauses, caress subclauses, encompass extended metaphor, stop briefly for a whimsical digression and culminate, ultimately, in a long and rhythmic peroration that signals to your audience that you would not take it unkindly if they, at just about this moment, would interrupt you with vigorous and sustained applause.

Prototype theory proposes that we have a broad picture in our minds of what a chair is; and we extend this picture by metaphor and analogy when trying to decide if any given thing that we are sitting on counts. We call up a best example, and then see if there is a reasonable direct or metaphorical thread that takes us from the example to the object under consideration.

His vision of the country was, as the title of Zangwill’s play had it, of a melting pot, but for him the pot—to extend the metaphor—had been smelted from the achievements of the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of the American continent, and those who joined the American experience owed those conquerors their respect and fealty. “The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him,” Roosevelt wrote in his multivolume The Winning of the West. He was largely uninterested in revisiting questions of justice about the white conquest of that which had belonged to Native Americans. “During the past century,” Roosevelt wrote, “a good deal of sentimental nonsense has been talked about our taking the Indians’ land.

What I mean is that if we try to mend this”—oh, God help him, he was about to launch into an extended engineering metaphor—“we need to make sure it’s, um, structurally sound. Better than before. No gaps in knowledge or intent.

According to my instructions, I’m supposed to laugh at you now.” “Go ahead?” The voice managed a kind of embarrassed chuckle. More soft tapping sounds, but the voice spoke again before they finished. “I won’t give you my identity. It’s not important. Know that I am an interested party, and I want you to begin booking your travel back home. You have no particular skills. You know this. You’re a fairly standard teenage boy. You have no use but to be used.” “I know it’s fun to be cryptic, but that last thing made zero sense.” I wanted the voice to keep talking, because as I wiggled my hands, I realized the zip tie wasn’t as tight as it needed to be. “Think of yourself as a package. It’s Christmas, so picture a nicely wrapped present. Charlotte carries it around. It’s heavy in her arms, but it’s pleasing to look at it. Maybe the package talks. It’s witty. It’s flattering. It makes her feel special, and she likes that feeling. And one day Charlotte leaves it somewhere in public, and poof, it is taken from her. Charlotte is sad. Then furious. Charlotte will do anything to get her present back. Horrible things. Things that will end in her death, or imprisonment. We don’t want Charlotte to do these things.” “So in this weird children’s story you’re telling me, I’m a talking package.” I’d put my wrists between my knees, and slowly, slowly, I worked one curled hand out of its binding. “That’s a pretty stupid extended metaphor. Did you fail English class? You were more of a math person, weren’t you?