Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.
Human writing reflects that of the universe; it is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing.
I think you need a concrete, real-world metaphor to talk about inner life without feeling like a jerk.
'Safe Harbor' is a state of mind... it's the place - in reality or metaphor - to which one goes in times of trouble or worry. It can be a friendship, marriage, church, garden, beach, poem, prayer, or song.
As a young physician in the mid-'80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease.
Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.
Bob Dole is not a romantic, at least not an immediate one. Bob Dole is not one to waste a lot of time on metaphor.
I force myself to outline, but not too closely, so I guess I plot by the seat of my pants? My natural instinct is to dive right in, but I know I'll get stuck. I like to stick with the architect vs. gardener metaphor. I guess I'm a gardener who plants tomatoes. I have the sticks in the ground and let the vines grow along those parameters.
'The Iliad' includes some snappy sports reporting, and writers ever since have been probing athletes for signifiers, for metaphor amped by grit under pressure.
The whole concept of the devil is a metaphor on one level.
I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
It's easy to look at the vampires as a metaphor for any feared or misunderstood group. It's also easy to look at them as a metaphor for a shadow organization that says one thing and has a completely different agenda on their mind, and anybody who gets in their way, they just get rid of them. Does that sound familiar?
Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'
I think of myself as a writer as much as I think of myself as a linguist and an academic. I really enjoy writing - playing with language and getting just the right metaphor.
If what you're writing is genuine, regardless of whether it sounds cliche or people wouldn't necessarily think it's the most brilliant metaphor in the world, it's always important to be genuine with what you're writing; at least, that's how I feel.
For many years, when people described how the Internet worked - whether they were talking about shopping, communicating, or starting a business there - they inevitably invoked a single metaphor. The Internet, said just about everybody, was a contemporary incarnation of the wild, wild West.
Everything I do is a metaphor of the universal order.
Beyond diversity, the story of Obama's influence on the courts is more complex. Indeed, it could serve as a metaphor for his Presidency: symbolically rich but substantively hazy. Obama took office after years of intense conservative focus on the courts.
