30 Quotes by James Geary

Aphorisms are literature’s hand luggage. Light and compact, they fit easily into the overhead compartment of your brain.

A kenning is a metaphorical circumlocution consisting of paired nouns or a noun phrase. For example, in ancient Icelandic verse, a sword is not a sword but an “icicle of blood”; a ship is not a ship but the “horse of the sea”; and eyes are not eyes but the “moons of the forehead.” Similarly, the earth is “the floor of the hall of the winds” or “the sea trodden on by animals,” while fire is “destroyer of timber” or “the sun of houses.

Why should jokes and metaphors give such pleasure? Because we can’t stand very much ambiguity. Cognitive dissonance makes us uneasy, and for good reason-survival depends on making the world as predictable as possible. So when we figure something out, when we impose order on what seems chaotic, we heave a psychological sigh of relief.

These experiments demonstrate the conceptual synesthesia connecting our ideas of the concrete experience of space and the abstract experience of time. Our concept of physical motion through space is scaffolded onto our concept of chronological motion through time. Experiencing one-indeed, merely thinking about one-influences our experience of and thoughts about the other, just as the theory of embodied cognition suggests.

Few people may be consciously aware of the etymological origins of common words and phrases, but the essential metaphor-making process of comparing the unknown with the known is still vital and ongoing. This process is the way meaning was, is, and ever shall be made.

In Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge, Edelman theorizes that the human brain’s astonishing interconnectivity produces consciousness and, because of the astronomical number of associations our brains are capable of making, pattern recognition is the basis not just for metaphorical thinking but for all thinking.

The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was such a lauded lecturer in large part because, like Hui Tzu, he was skilled in finding the right analogies to illustrate his explanations of extremely abstract-and extremely difficult-concepts. He once compared a drop of water magnified 2,000 times to “a kind of teeming... like a crowd at a football game as seen from a very great distance.” That description has all the precision of good physics and good poetry.

For life is short and the art of writing books is very, very long.

Metaphor impinges on everything, allowing us – poets and non-poets alike – to experience and think about the world in fluid, unusual ways.