It is never over: simile / metaphor / analogy

Writing is a process, and a process never ends. No one completely masters writing. There is always something more to learn, something more to try out, something more to be surprised and amazed about. Sometimes, when writing really works, we amaze ourselves. We are surprised that we formed such a fine sentence. We suspect it was the pattern of language forming us! It is then that we see that writing is not just communication: it is self-discovery. One key to surprise, amazement, discovery is metaphor.

Metaphor is often explained simply as a comparison, using something known to explain something as yet unknown. Seen this way, metaphor is essential to knowledge: how do we know anything new except in relationship to what we already know? Metaphors join us, link us, connect us, and it is metaphors that I use to try to explain what I mean. Metaphors are inescapable; all language that matters to us is in some sense metaphor. Nature writers, writers actively seeking their connection to nature, are masters of metaphor.

The simplest metaphor is called a simile: some thing is like or similar to some other thing.

Midwinter

The commonest simile in connection with the new year is a book with blank pages. Nature's year is also a book to be written. This midwinter time represents a pause in the turning wheel of life. It is, in northern lands, the year's low point, its nadir. Life will swell, reach its zenith, before the next resting time. All the events of spring and summer and autumn, of sprouting and growth and see time, the beginning and the end, lie ahead. The whole circle of the seasons stretches away before us as we view the year from the cold plateau of January. (Circle 2)

Green as grass. Quick as a squirrel. Hard as a rock. Slippery as an eel. All the truest similes of nature are cliches. Many people have been struck by the same comparison. (Circle 220)

Metaphors can be looked at like similes without the "like." Instead of seeing that the winter cold has shut off access to the water like a person might shut off access to a building, the writer makes a direct statement that is not literally" true but is, nonetheless, correct. And because the metaphor is correct, it makes an effective beginning to an essay.

Cold has turned the key. Ice locks in the pond.

Ever since our short Indian Summer ended, dawns have lighted a fine fringing of frozen water along the edges. This lace-work of crystals has widened or narrowed according to the drop or ascent of the mercury. Yesterday this band of forming ice was no more than a foot wide, a shining rim framing in the dark pond water. But when we went to bed last night the mercury was plummeting. This morning it records thirteen degrees—almost twenty degrees below the freezing mark. I walk down the slope to the pond. Ice, in a thin but unbroken sheet, extends from shore to shore. One of those sudden, dramatic landmark events of the year has come in the night.

(Walk 296)

The essential quality of metaphor to connect our experience becomes almost mystical, almost a religious union when employed by nature writers.

Teale's Metaphors

Cordwood

All over the northern part of the country these days men are cutting cords of firewood for winter. We too are gathering wood, in a way, cording memories that will warm us later on. (Circle 160)

Scratch With the Hens

Of all the varied attitudes of mind, it seems to me the one that brings the most enjoyment in the out-of-doors is that quirk of imagination that lets you participate in fancy in the lives of the creatures you meet. John Burroughs expressed this outlook when he wrote to a friend: My thoughts go and scratch with the hens, they nip the new grass with the geese, they follow the wild ducks northward." And so did John Keats when he said: If a sparrow comes before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about in the gravel." (Circle 236)

We drift back and forth across the meadow on this crisp, bright morning. On each return we bring home a load of dry sticks broken from fallen branches in the woods. We add them to the pile accumulating in the entry shed to provide kindling for the fireplace fires of winter. This is always one of the most congenial tasks of the year. It is work that seems half play, If all the other work at Trail Wood were as enjoyable, Nellie observes, we could rename our place and call it "Happy Chores Farm."

So far as I can recall, I have encountered only one reference in literature concerning this unhurried harvest under the trees, amid the ferns and moss and carpets of the autumn leaves, this work and play that occupies us so pleasantly on this late-October day, In The Alfoxden Journal that Dorothy Wadsworth kept in 1789 when she and her brother William lived in the south of England near Samuel Taylor Coleridge, there are such recurring mentions of gathering sticks as : William gathered sticks...," Gathered sticks with William in the woods...," Gathered sticks in the further woods. The dell green with moss and brambles...."

In our "gathering sticks" today, we watch the play of sunlight among the tree trunks. We stop to breathe in the heavy fragrance of the autumn woods. We halt our work to follow with our eyes the scurrying progress of a chipmunk or a gray squirrel. We all—chipmunk, gray squirrel, Nellie, and I—are preparing for winter. These are the provident days of autumn. Each in its own way—the chipmunk storing nuts in its burrow, the birds, now far away, winging farther and farther toward the south, the Polistes wasps and the cluster flies seeking to squeeze themselves through cracks into the protection of buildings, the wood turtle burrowing into the mud for its long hibernation, Nellie and I bringing in sticks—so we all, bird, rodent and insect and reptile and human, make our autumn preparations. (Walk 251-252)

Many Worlds

The natural world we know is, in reality, a multitude of worlds. As Zangwill, the novelist, once put it: The scent world of dogs, the eye world of bird, the earth world of worms, the water world of fishes, the flesh world of parasites, intersect one another inextricably and with an infinite interlacing, yet each is a symmetric sphere of being, a rounded whole, and to its denizens the sole and self-sufficient cosmos." We, who live in the world of men, can cross the boundaries of these little worlds around us only in imagination. For we, too, are prisoners within our own individual spheres of being. We look in the mirror and see our faces. They are the only voices with which we will ever speak. We contemplate our hands. They are the only hands we will ever use. Each of us is, in a manner of speaking, under life sentence, a prisoner within the cell of ourselves. We escape only, as we travel into those lesser worlds around us only, in imagination. (Circle 220)

The Tug of Migration

In the dark that comes so noticeably sooner now, Nellie and I, a little after nine o'clock this evening, follow the path up onto the open, higher ground of the Starfield. To our south, our white house rises, a vaguely glimmering shape under the black bulk of the hickory trees. To our north, the edge of the woods lifts in an ebony wall against the sky. The air is limpid and from black horizon to black horizon points of light—big stars, little stars, bright stars, faint stars—all are burning with a special intensity.

As the air grows chill, we note how the calling of the katydids becomes slower and slower. They drawl, drag out each syllable. At times we wonder if they will finish what they begin to say. They all speak deliberately, as though enunciating for listeners who are hard of hearing.

While we are standing here beneath the multitude of the stars, our ears catch other sounds—the little cheeps and calls of migrants passing overhead. By now may of our birds have slipped away almost unnoticed. Where are the kingbirds of summer days and where the orioles that hatched in the nest in the hickory tree? Almost in surprise, we realize they are gone, that we will not see them again until spring. And now, night after night, birds from farther north—like these unknown wayfarers traveling under the stars above Trail Wood—are streaming southward.

We gaze after the sounds when they have moved away beyond reach of our ears. How beautiful the night! How wonderful a time for flying! What a great adventure lies before these small travelers whose lives are touching ours only once, only through faint sounds in this starlit night. Standing here motionless, wingless, earthbound, Nellie and I almost feel the tug of migration ourselves. (Walk 212-3)

To demonstrate how pervasive are analogies, examine some that affect your own view of life.

Do you see existence as a battle" or a "game"?

Is nature a "survival of the fittest" or a "cooperative enterprise"?

Do you believe that people are naturally as "innocent as a lamb" or as "predatory as a wolf"?

Metaphors determine how we express our basic insights. Sometimes the metaphors we use distort our view of reality. Sometimes our metaphors need to be examined closely because they restrict our ways of seeing reality accurately and with a new awareness. But always it is metaphor that we use when we communicate what is most important to us.

Night Doesn't Fall (September 20)

These later days of summer mark, with their visible changes, a swifter descent in the long decline of the season. Smoothly, like water picking up speed as it nears the millrace, the days reveal the impetus of approaching autumn. In the noon sunshine, the insects sing with summer cheer. But, even at midday, there is a slight chill in the shadows. I can sense a change, a shift imbalance, a premonition of swifter change to come.

We see the end of this day far out on the sea meadows. The light ebbs away in a glory of pastel colors. The change from day to dusk to dark comes in an almost imperceptible transition. But before we reach home, nightfall is complete.

We call it nightfall. But night doesn't fall.

It doesn't descend from the sky so much as it rises from the earth. Similarly, we speak of falling dew. Neither night nor the dew descends out of the sky. The dew condenses from moisture near the ground. And darkness begins at the earth and ascends. The shadows increase in number and density. Night is the sum total of the shadows. It is one consuming shadow in the end—the shadow of our earth itself.

Anyone who has ridden in an airplane at sunset or as the twilight deepens, knows that night rises from the earth instead of descending from the sky. He can see the gathering of night on the ground below him. Sunlight still bathes his plane in brilliance when the hills and fields, the woods and lakes and streams below have faded into the deepening gloom. Only after night has established itself on the surface of the earth does it ascend into the upper sky.

The pace at which the dusk advances depends upon where you see it on the ball of the earth. Near the equator, the transition between day and night is relatively swift. The twilights are short. But farther from the equator, to north and south, the evenings grow longer. Night comes gradually; sunset lingers; and the dusk of summer days is a slow, barely discernible transition. When does twilight end? Meteorologists have provided an exact answer. Night has come and twilight is over when the sun is eighteen degrees below the horizon. (Circle 185-6)

Developing a metaphoric insight can satisfy and convince us when the metaphors seem natural. Such developed metaphors are called analogies. It is by analogy that we not only make sense of our relationship to the world but gain esthetic enjoyment from it. Analogy is both knowledge and beauty combined.

The Enchanted Labyrinth (November 1)

It occurred to me today that an interest in nature leads you into a kind of enchanted labyrinth. You wander from corridor to corridor; one interest leads to another interest; one discovery to another discovery. It matters little where you begin. You may first fall under the spell of birds or wild flowers or you may become curious about lichens or grasshoppers or trees or rocks or fossils or waterweeds. If you have any inquisitiveness at all, you soon find yourself branching off, wandering enchanted down charming bypaths.

Rowland R. McElvare, a banker friend of mine, some years ago became interested in collecting day-flying Heliothid moths. His primary concern was insects. But soon he found he was also studying the plants on which the moths were discovered. He thus developed a liking for botany. Then he began to note the soil in which these plants were most often encountered. In this manner, an understanding of geology began. Like the house that Jack built, his interest in nature continued to expand.

Another friend of mine spent years gathering facts about the early history of the community in which he lived. And, in so doing, he began to notice the moss and lichens. He took up the study of these fascinating forms of plant life on the side. Then his curiosity was aroused by the small beetles and other tiny creatures he found living amid the mosses. In this way, his interest grew and widened.

J. Henri Fabre, world-famous as a student of insects, began his study of nature by collecting shells when teaching school on the island of Corsica. Later, at Avignon, he searched the fields for toadstools and prepared exquisite drawings of the fungi of Provence, water colors that are still in existence. His fame rests on his study of insects but his interests embraced all nature. Louis Agassiz, noted in far-ranging fields but probably most of all for his work on glaciation, began with the study of fishes. And Charles Darwin entered the enchanted labyrinth of nature study through an early interest in beetles.

We cannot watch sandpipers, following receding waves and stabbing at the wet sand for food, without soon wondering what they are eating. And that leads us into another of nature's innumerable corridors. All living things are linked together in various ways—by predator chains and food chains, by parasitism and symbiosis. Nothing lives to itself alone. Nothing is disassociated from its surroundings. An interest in tadpoles sooner or later leads to an interest in the dytiscus beetle that preys on them. The study of hognosed snakes inevitably leads to the study of toads upon which they feed. Even if your special interest is catbirds, you are led to a consideration of the life of the deer mouse. For these mice often appropriate the nests of catbirds as winter homes. Everywhere we turn in nature, new and interesting corridors appear before us, waiting to be explored. All are interconnecting. They lead us as far as we care to go.  (Circle 218)

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