Thursday, June 6, 2024

A second thought about metaphors

 Jorge Luis Borges said he studied Old English because he was drawn to the metaphors. The ocean was “the whale’s road.”

A good metaphor persuades. You believe that you understand something in a new way. 

• Source: Borges’ comment comes from Jacob A. Stein, “The Power of Metaphor”; The American Scholar, June 20, 2016.

at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Stories about bewildering places

 I found Souvankham Thammavongsa’s  How to Pronounce Knife , a collection of 14 short stories, and told myself I would enjoy one a night for...

  • Lang: 'Letters to Dead Authors'
      Andrew Lang, a Scottish polymath who lived from 1844 to 1912, wrote   Letters to Dead Authors . I like the idea of the book, rather than t...
  • Alice Oswald's poem on battle
     An appropriate read for Memorial Day? How about Alice Oswald’s long poem  Memorial , which recounts how soldiers in the  Iliad  met their e...
  • The writer’s responsibility
     James Baldwin said, “The responsibility of the writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.” So much of the America...