I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (12 page)

I
n 1977, six years before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the British writer William Golding was invited to speak to a group of Anglophiles in Lille, France. In his address, he said:

 

Consider a man riding a bicycle.
Whoever he is, we can say three things about him.
We know he got on the bicycle and started to move.
We know that at some point he will stop and get off.
Most important of all, we know that
if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey
he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle, he will fall off it.
That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing.

 

Golding had been groomed by his parents to become a scientist, but in his second year at Oxford he got the literature bug and abandoned thoughts of a scientific career. Things started off nicely. A year before he graduated
in 1935, he came out with a small volume of verse, making him a published author at age twenty-three.

After graduation, he worked for several years at a series of odd jobs while writing in his spare time, but nothing of importance emerged. In 1940, he joined the Royal Navy and spent the next six years witnessing a host of life-altering sights, including the sinking of the
Bismarck
and the Normandy invasion.

After the war, Golding's view of the world was transformed, and any prior illusions he had held about civilization were gone forever (years later, he would say he had come to the view that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey”). While teaching during the day, he began working at night on a dark, allegorical tale about a group of boys who become stranded on a desert island and slowly degenerate from civilized English schoolboys to savage and vicious brutes. He titled the work
Lord of the Flies
, a literal translation of the Hebrew word for
Beelzebub
. In the novel, it is also the name the boys give to a fly-ridden pig's skull they have mounted on a stake.

Golding began submitting his manuscript to publishers, only to have it rejected twenty-one times, often in the most unmerciful way. One said it was an “absurd and uninteresting fantasy.” Another called it, “Rubbish and dull. Pointless.” The negative reception might have caused a less determined person to give up. But, to return to Golding's earlier metaphor, the forty-three-year old writer stayed on the bicycle and kept pedaling—all the way into literary history.

In all metaphorical language, people try to explain one thing—often an abstract concept like
life
—by relating it to something else. Once a link is established, then all the attributes of the second domain—like
riding a bicycle
—can be applied back to the original domain. Golding could have selected any aspect of bicycling—like dodging potholes or breaking away from the pack—but he went with the idea of simply keeping a bike in motion as his metaphor for life's journey. Albert Einstein did the same thing when he observed:

 

Life is like riding a bicycle.
To keep your balance you must keep moving.

 

When one is trying to help people get a better understanding of something as ethereal as the nature of life, a bicycle metaphor has especially broad appeal. After all, almost everyone has had the experience of riding one, and most people can extrapolate backward from the concrete experience to the abstract idea. The legendary cartoonist Charles M. Schulz had his character Charlie Brown use a bicycle metaphor to lay out yet another great truth of human existence—that most of us don't even come close to living up to our potential. In his trademark way, Schulz had Charlie say it in a witty rather than a preachy way:

 

Life is like a ten-speed bicycle.
Most of us have gears we never use.

 

When people are asked to provide examples of a life metaphor, they commonly say things like
life is a beach
, or
life is a bowl of cherries
(from a popular 1930s song), or perhaps
life is a cabaret
(from the 1966 musical and 1972 film). Or maybe they will offer a simile like
life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're gonna get
(popularized by the 1994 film
Forrest Gump
). And while these are all perfectly fine examples of metaphorical phrasing, they don't come close to capturing the power of a metaphor to capture essential aspects of human life.

The Scottish writer James M. Barrie is best remembered as the author of
Peter Pan,
one of the most successful plays of all time, but he also wrote highly regarded satires, essays, and novels. One of his early efforts was
The Little Minister
, an 1891 novel that was turned into an 1897 play (and in 1934 adapted into a film version that featured an impressive performance by the young Katharine Hepburn). The original novel contains a line that made a deep impression on me when I first came upon it many decades ago:

 

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story,
and writes another, and his humblest hour is when he compares
the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.

 

After first reading this in my mid-twenties, I began thinking about my father. I know from a few early conversations that a number of his youthful dreams were never to materialize in his adult years. My dad was a good man, but he always had a sadness in his eyes. And he was an alcoholic from as early as I can remember. I didn't have the maturity—at the time—to understand it all, but a decade or so later an observation attributed to George Bernard Shaw helped put it all in perspective:

 

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

 

When I first read Barrie's diary metaphor, I viewed it as a profound thought expressed beautifully, and I immediately filed it away in a compartment in my brain. I also recorded it on an index card and placed it in a manila folder I had titled
Words to Live By
. Over the years, I returned to the observation many times as I reflected on my own journey.

As the decades have passed, I've come across many other wonderful metaphors for life—and the best ones have never failed to give me pause for reflection:

 

Life is a hospital in which every patient
is possessed by the desire of changing his bed.
One would prefer to suffer near the fire,
and another is certain he would get well if he were by the window.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Life is like a library owned by an author.
In it are a few books which he wrote himself,
but most of them were written for him.

HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK

Life…is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.

Life is like a game of cards.
The hand that is dealt you represents determinism;
the way you play it is free will.

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU

Life is no “brief candle” to me.
It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment,
and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible
before handing it on to future generations.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Some came from unexpected sources, like the Charlie Brown quote earlier. Another pleasant surprise came from a person named Brian Dyson. I'd never heard of him, but the image he painted was so vivid—and the sentiment so powerful—I was shocked to discover he was, at the time, CEO of Coca-Cola:

 

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air.
You name them—work, family, health, friends, and spirit,
and you're keeping all of these in the air.
You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball.
If you drop it, it will bounce back.
But the other four balls—family, health, friends, and spirit—are made of glass.
If you drop one of these,
they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged, or even shattered.
They will never be the same.
You must understand that and strive for balance in your life.

 

Still others came from people I had long admired, like John W. Gardner,
the noted American educator and President Kennedy's secretary of health, education, and welfare. Gardner, a provocative thinker and a beautiful writer, authored several inspiring works, including a 1961 book—titled
Excellence
—that I still take off the shelf from time to time. He once wrote:

 

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

 

This observation reminds us that the mistakes we make in life cannot be erased away or treated as if they never happened. Mistakes, along with triumphs, are part of our permanent record—like a transcript from the school of life. Part of the art of living is to recognize that we must learn from the mistakes we will inevitably make, and incorporate that learning into the steps we take as we move forward. It's often called
failing forward.

In the remainder of the chapter, you will find over a hundred observations in which life is likened to such things as a banquet, a college, a mansion, an onion, a violin (and other musical instruments), a superhighway, a painting, a game of chess, and even a roll of toilet paper. No other book in history, to the best of my knowledge, has ever assembled in one chapter more analogies and metaphors on this topic. I hope the compilation will help you gain a deeper appreciation of your life, or help you explain some lessons of life to others.

 

Life is my college. May I graduate well and earn some honors!

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool,
a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

SHOLOM ALEICHEM

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told,
“I am with you kid. Let's go!”

MAYA ANGELOU

Life is like a taxi ride; the meter keeps on ticking,
whether you're getting anywhere, or just standing still.

ANONYMOUS

The point of this saying, which goes back to at least the early years of the twentieth century, is clear: life goes on whether you do something with it, or not. A
taximeter
(notice that it is one word) is a device that calculates fares on the basis of distance traveled and total travel time. The device goes back to ancient Rome, and increasingly sophisticated forms have been used ever since. In the 1800s, they were attached to a horse-driven two-wheeled carriage known as a
cabriolet.
The word
taxicab
is a shortened version of
taximeter cabriolet
.

 

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.

ARISTOTLE

Aristotle was an advocate of the
golden mean
, the desirable middle course between two ineffective extremes. Here he makes an argument for moderation. The implication is clear—drink enough of life so that, at the end, you won't be thirsting for more; but not so much that you will stagger in a stupor into your grave.

 

Life is a journey, but don't worry, you'll find a parking spot at the end.

ISAAC ASIMOV

Life is always walking up to us and saying, “Come on in, the living's fine,”
and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

RUSSELL BAKER

Someone told me life is a water wheel. It turns. The trick is to
hold your nose when you're under and not get dizzy when you're up.

JAMES BALDWIN

This passage from
Nobody Knows My Name
(1961) is a nice reminder that we shouldn't get too happy when things go well, or too upset when they don't.

 

Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen;
and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands;
the real art is in getting them clean again.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Life is a long lesson in humility.

JAMES M. BARRIE

Life is rather like a tin of sardines.
We're all of us looking for the key.

ALAN BENNETT

Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well.

JOSH BILLINGS
(Henry Wheeler Shaw)

Life is a grindstone, and whether it grinds a man down
or polishes him up depends on what he is made of.

JOSH BILLINGS
(Henry Wheeler Shaw)

This observation has been attributed to many others, most notably Jacob M. Braude of
The Speaker's Library
fame. The most clever alteration of the saying comes from Fred Allen: “The world is a grindstone and life is your nose.”

 

Life is much more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt
as opposed to a surprise party.

JIMMY BUFFETT

Life itself is the proper binge.

JULIA CHILD

That is, there is no shortage of improper things to binge on, but only one proper one—life itself.

 

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

SAMUEL BUTLER

Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.

SAMUEL BUTLER

Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on
without bothering everybody with a lot of questions,
and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL