I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (18 page)

Love is like a game of poker.
The girl, if she wants to win a hand that may affect her whole life,
should be careful not to show her cards before the guy shows his.

FRANK SINATRA

A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.

STENDHAL

Love is a fruit, in season at all times and within the reach of every hand.
Anyone may gather it and no limit is set.

MOTHER TERESA

Love must be as much a light as a flame.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

To say that you can love one person all your life is like
saying that one candle will continue to burn as long as you live.

LEO TOLSTOY

There is the same difference in a person before and after he is in love
as between an unlighted lamp and one that is burning.
The lamp was there and was a good lamp,
but now it is shedding light, too, and that is its real function.

VINCENT VAN GOGH,
in a letter to brother Theo

To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.

DAVID VISCOTT

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by Imagination.

VOLTAIRE

Love…wears a bandage which conceals the faults of the beloved.
He has wings; he comes quickly and flies away the same.

VOLTAIRE

In this passage from the
Philosophical Dictionary
(1764), Voltaire uses the word
bandage
in a manner that is closer in meaning to the English word
blindfold.

 

Love is like a cigar.
If it goes out, you can light it again, but it never tastes quite the same.

ARCHIBALD WAVELL

A man in love is like a clipped coupon—it's time to cash in.

MAE WEST

All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

Love's chemistry thrives best in equal heat.

JOHN WILMOT

That is, one-sided love is a pale imitation of the real thing. If one person heats up and the other doesn't, there can be no chemical reaction.

 

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

M
ichel de Montaigne was born in 1533 at his family's chateau near Bordeaux, France. The first child of a wealthy Catholic landowner and a mother of Spanish-Jewish descent, he had an unusual upbringing. While he was permitted to speak French when playing outside with friends or interacting with farmhands, in the home he was allowed to communicate only in Latin until he was six years old (a practice his father believed would greatly enhance the youngster's mental development). As part of his grooming process, he was roused from his sleep each morning by the soothing sounds of a small chamber music ensemble and, as the day progressed, he was privately tutored in classical literature. Young Montaigne developed a great love of reading, a passion that continued until his death. Not much else is known about his early years, but he did go on to study law and, for a time, practiced law and dabbled in politics.

In 1570, at age thirty-seven, Montaigne stepped away from public life and retired to his family's chateau. He spent most of his time in a circular tower room—his
Solitarium
—where he was surrounded by over a thousand books, an astonishing number for the time. Of his special room, he wrote,
“I try to keep this corner as a haven against the tempest outside.” And of his treasured library, he wrote, “When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”

Montaigne broke new ground in the age-old method of introspection with the invention of a whole new literary genre: the essay. When the first two volumes of his work were published in 1580, they were titled
Essais
(in English,
Essays
). Before Montaigne, the word
essay
meant “to try; to attempt.” The root meaning was “to examine, to put to a test,” similar to the current term
assay.
After Montaigne, the word took on its modern meaning—a short written composition on a subject, usually presenting the personal view of the author.

When readers discover Montaigne for the first time—as I did when I was in college—they are often delighted to find so modern a thinker in someone writing almost 450 years ago. Montaigne was tolerant in an age of bigotry, curious in a time of dogmatism, and focused on self—a truly modern fixation—in an era when few others would admit to such a thing. And unlike anyone else in his time, he wrote in a loose and free-wheeling way, generously quoting ancient thinkers and meandering off the path with delightful digressions. Aldous Huxley once described his method as “free association, artistically controlled.”

In addition to writing about himself, Montaigne also wrote with wisdom—and often wit—on many other subjects. A classic is his description of marriage:

 

It may be compared to a cage,
the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair to get out.

 

When Montaigne's three-volume collection of essays was translated into English in 1603, it became very popular in London's literary circles (Shakespeare and Ben Jonson both read it with great interest). A few years later, somewhere between 1609 and 1612, John Webster's play titled
The White Devil
featured the following passage, also about marriage:

 

'Tis just like a summer bird-cage in a garden:
the birds that are without despair to get in, and
the birds that are within despair…for fear they shall never get out.

 

The wording is so similar to Montaigne's that it seems indisputable that Webster had plagiarized the thought. He also might have been influenced by a 1602 poem by the English poet John Davies:

 

Wedlock indeed hath oft compared been
To public feasts, where meet a public rout;
Where they that are without would fain go in,
And they that are within would fain go out.

 

Throughout history, a wide variety of marital metaphors have been advanced. In his 1693 play
The Old Bachelor
, English playwright William Congreve found an analogy between marriage and the theater:

 

Courtship to marriage,
as a very witty prologue to a very dull play.

 

A prologue, of course, is an introduction to a literary work. From ancient Greece to the eighteenth century, prologues were commonly used to introduce characters and set the stage for poems as well as plays. Prologues went out of fashion in the nineteenth century and are now rarely seen. But to seventeenth-century theater-goers, the point of Congreve's analogy was clear—compared with the drama of courtship, marriage is boring. A 1714 poem by Alexander Pope changed the metaphor but made the same point:

 

They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.

 

In his 1820 book
Lacon
, English writer Charles Caleb Colton echoes the Congreve and Pope sentiments but does so by likening marriage to a meal:

 

Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner.

 

In Colton's observation, courtship is analogous to grace, and his argument is that both are often better than what is to come after them. This was history's first
marriage as a meal
metaphor, and it may have stimulated two later observations:

 

Marriage is a meal where the soup is better than the dessert.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Marriage is like a dull meal, with the dessert at the beginning.

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

One fascinating discovery I made while researching this book was seeing how often a theme can be maintained, even though the metaphor changes:

 

Marriage is a book in which the first chapter is written in poetry
and the remaining chapters in prose.

BEVERLEY NICHOLS

The days just prior to marriage
are like a snappy introduction to a tedious book.

WILSON MIZNER

Here, the metaphor has been changed to a book, but the message is the same: marriage is good at the beginning and gets worse over time. And in one final example, notice how the same point is made in yet another way in this old German proverb:

 

Marriage is fever in reverse;
it starts with heat and ends with cold.

While many of the observations so far have portrayed matrimony as dull and boring, many marriages are so quarrelsome and contentious they can hardly be called unexciting. These combative marriages represent another common type of marriage, and they require another type of metaphor—
marriage as war
. A perfect illustration is an anonymous saying that goes back many generations:

 

Marriage is the only war
where one sleeps with the enemy.

 

A more recent example surfaced in pop culture in the early nineties, just after the first Gulf War, when a character on the
Murphy Brown
television sitcom said:

 

Marriage is the Scud missile of relationships.

 

Despite the missile reference, this remark was less about war and more about the quality of marital relationships. And when you recall that many of Iraq's Scud missiles were complete duds, the implication is clear.

Perhaps the most famous
marriage as war
metaphor comes from one of history's most famous writers, Robert Louis Stevenson:

 

Marriage is like life in this—
that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

 

Stevenson is best known for adventure novels like
Treasure Island
,
Kidnapped
, and
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, but he was also a poet, children's author, travel writer, and essayist. This observation comes from
Virginibus Puerisque
, an 1881 collection of essays in which he opined on many subjects, including matrimony. On that topic, he also wrote: “Marriage is one long conversation, checkered by disputes.”

One would normally think that likening marriage to war is a negative thing, but not necessarily. In her 1968 autobiography
On Reflection
, Helen Hayes wrote:

 

Marriage is like a war.
There are moments of chivalry and gallantry
that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats,
the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness,
the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it.
But mostly there are the long dull sieges,
the waiting, the terror and boredom.
Women understand this better than men;
they are better able to survive attrition.

 

Hayes, called the First Lady of the American Theater, had a career that lasted a full eighty years. She made her first stage appearance in 1905, at age five, and her last in 1985, when she played Miss Marple in a made-for-TV adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel. In the 1920s, she was having a miserable time at a New York party when she was approached by Charles MacArthur, a playwright and journalist from Chicago. He gently placed some salted peanuts into her hand and said, “I wish they were emeralds.” She was instantly smitten, and the couple were soon wed. Their marriage saw deep personal fulfillment, great professional success, and a fair amount of tragedy, including the death of their only daughter to polio. By all accounts, the couple had a legendary love affair, and they remained married until his death in 1956.

Of all human institutions, marriage has been one of the most maligned, and many of the characterizations have been metaphorical. Some are centuries old, as when the legendary lover Giacomo Casanova wrote that “Marriage is the tomb of love.” Or when Lord Byron wrote “Though women are angels, yet wedlock's the devil.” Many more come from recent times:

 

If variety is the spice of life,
marriage is the big can of leftover Spam.

JOHNNY CARSON

I always compare marriage to communism.
They're both institutions that don't conform to human nature,
so you're going to end up with lying and hypocrisy.

BILL MAHER

Marriage can be viewed as the waiting room for death.

MIKE MYERS

While men have generally led the parade against marriage, women have also contributed many memorable observations:

 

Love-matches are made by people who are content,
for a month of honey, to condemn themselves to a life of vinegar.

MARGUERITE BLESSINGTON

Marriage is usually considered the grave, and not the cradle of love.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY

Conjugality made me think of a three-legged race,
where two people cannot go fast and keep tripping each other
because their two legs are tied together.

BRENDA UELAND

But perhaps my favorite female offering comes from the English writer Marie Corelli, a woman who is now barely remembered, even though she was the best-selling female novelist in England at the turn of the twentieth century. Once described as “the Jacqueline Susann of her time,” she wrote
melodramatic and highly romanticized novels that were ridiculed by critics but devoured by a fan base that included such elite readers as Queen Victoria and Oscar Wilde. Of the hundreds of thousands of words she penned, the most famous were these:

 

I never married because there was no need.
I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband.
I have a dog which growls every morning,
a parrot which swears all afternoon,
and a cat that comes home late at night.

 

So far, we've featured observations strictly about
marriage
. In the rest of the chapter you'll find analogies, metaphors, and similes on such related topics as husbands and wives, giving birth and raising children, divorce and remarriage, parent-child relationships, and a few other aspects of home and family life.

 

Marriage, in life, is like a duel in the midst of a battle.

EDMOND ABOUT

A divorce is like an amputation;
you survive, but there's less of you.

MARGARET ATWOOD

Wives are young men's mistresses,
companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.

FRANCIS BACON

A bachelor's life is a fine breakfast,
a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner.

FRANCIS BACON

That is, young bachelors have it best, but things get worse as they age, when—recalling the prior Bacon quote—they have nobody to nurse them.

 

Alimony is like buying oats for a dead horse.

ARTHUR “BUGS” BAER

Baer was a popular sports writer and humorist in the first half of the twentieth century. When Milton Berle needed fresh material, he would take Baer to lunch at Toots Shor's to pick his brain. Baer likely inspired a famous Berle quip: “Alimony is like putting gas into another guy's car.”

 

When you're the only pea in the pod
your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond.

RUSSELL BAKER,
on only children

Marriage must constantly fight against
a monster which devours everything: routine.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

This comes from Balzac's 1829
The Physiology of Marriage
, where he also wrote, “The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.”

 

Divorce is the psychological equivalent
of a triple coronary by-pass.

MARY KAY BLAKELY

In a happy marriage,
it is the wife who provides the climate,
the husband the landscape.