In 121 A.D., the man the world has come to know as Marcus Aurelius was born into one of the most powerful families in the Roman Empire. The young Marcus was so precocious that he aroused the attention of the emperor Hadrian. He was soon on a fast track to Roman leadership and, at age ten, was being educated by Rome’s best thinkers. By age eleven, the ruler-in-training was describing himself as a follower of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus.
Shortly after becoming emperor at age forty, Marcus was the realization of a dream Plato once had—that a philosopher-king would one day rule the empire. Over the next two decades, though, his record didn’t quite live up to the hype. Ever since, historians have tried to reconcile his high-minded principles with his actual accomplishments.
In the last ten years of his reign, Marcus kept a personal journal in which he recorded his personal reflections. The diary, never intended for publication, was discovered after his death at age fifty-nine and was eventually published under the simple title Meditations. It went on to become one of antiquity’s most influential books. As a result of Meditations, more is known about the inner thoughts of this one Roman emperor than all the other emperors combined.
During Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, he was asked to name one book—other than the Bible—that had helped him most. When he cited the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, it sparked my interest. As I began to peruse the book, one observation got my attention:
The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing;
the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unforeseen attack.
In this observation, we see what may be a shift in Marcus’s thinking as he has grown older. At an earlier stage of life, the privileged young man might easily have taken the view that life was like dancing—an affair where things go well if one only learns the necessary steps and keeps in time with the music. As emperor, though, he reigned over a country that was threatened by barbarians outside the gate and many political enemies within. The mature Aurelius replaced a dancing metaphor with a wrestling one.
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, even in translations that go back a century, have a distinctly modern feel. Dipping into almost any page of the work, one finds observations that would not be out of place in a modern self-help manual, such as “Our life is what our thoughts make it.” There are also many metaphorical observations:
What is not good for the hive is not good for the bee.
Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break;
it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.
When reflecting on the human condition, philosophically inclined people have always been drawn to metaphorical thinking. Notice what happens when Leo Tolstoy likens the human capacity for self-delusion to a mathematical fraction:
A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is
and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself.
The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.
For anybody with a basic understanding of mathematics, this is a brilliant way of describing something we all know but have trouble putting into words—the more people inflate themselves, the smaller they become.
Also writing on the subject of man and the phenomenon of self-evaluation, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., wrote in his 1891 book Over the Teacups:
A man is a kind of inverted thermometer, the bulb uppermost,
and the column of self-valuation is all the time going up and down.
Like so many good metaphors, this one is hard to get out of one’s mind once it is first read. The bulb, it should be clear, is a person’s head, and the different temperature readings reflect the varying self-concept assessments, which change—often markedly—from day to day and season to season. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson, though, who offered the most inspired metaphorical thought on the subject of temperatures and human beings:
We boil at different degrees.
Metaphorical language has also proved invaluable in helping people cope with tragedies. In 1945, a New Jersey couple on the periphery of Albert Einstein’s life experienced one of the great human sorrows—the death of their child. More than four decades earlier, in 1902, the twenty-two-year-old Einstein had experienced the same loss. At the time, while working as a clerk in a Swiss patent office, he was informed by his girlfriend and eventual wife, Mileva, that she was pregnant. The prospect of an illegitimate child was not likely to enhance the young man’s career prospects, so the couple decided to register with an adoption agency. Shortly after the birth, though, the baby died of scarlet fever. The event left the new parents deeply shaken. Einstein’s 1945 note to the grieving parents suggests a deep familiarity with the emotions they were likely to be experiencing:
When the expected course of everyday life is interrupted,
we realize that we are like shipwrecked people
trying to keep their balance on a miserable plank in the open sea,
having forgotten where they came from
and not knowing whither they are drifting.
Einstein had a lot on his plate in those days, so he might have simply penned a brief note of condolence. But he took the time to craft a message that reflected the emotional state of people who’ve suffered a great loss—the helpless feeling of being adrift.
When people try to communicate deeply personal experiences, it can be difficult. After all, such experiences are—well—deeply personal. In a 1960 article in the Ladies’ Home Journal, opera singer Marian Anderson described what life was like for a black woman in a white world. Two decades earlier, the internationally acclaimed contralto had been denied permission to sing in Washington’s Constitution Hall. Undeterred, she decided to give an outdoor concert at the Lincoln Memorial. More than 75,000 people showed up, providing support for Anderson and showing contempt for the racist policy that had tried to silence her. In the article, she chose a fascinating way to describe racial prejudice:
Sometimes, it’s like a hair across your cheek.
You can’t see it, you can’t find it with your fingers,
but you keep brushing at it because the feel of it is irritating.
In this personal and poignant reflection, Anderson found a beautiful way to describe one of the uglier aspects of life. It was also a perfect way for the singer to connect her experience with the Journal’s mainly female readers, all of whom could relate to the analogy of a hair across the face.
Prejudice—whether based on religion, race, gender, class, or anything else—is one of the most troublesome weeds in the garden of human life and will in all likelihood never be completely eliminated. The essential nature of the affliction—and the difficulty involved in overcoming it—was captured in a passage in Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 classic, Jane Eyre:
Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart
whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education;
they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.
Another great theme in human history has been the short-sighted pursuit of practices that are not in our long-term best interest. Whether it has to do with smoking, eating, drinking, or a wide variety of other behaviors, countless people live every day as if the principle of accountability did not apply to them. Norman Cousins, aware of this flaw in the human character, wrote, “Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.” And then he added:
A human being fashions his consequences
as surely as he fashions his goods or his dwelling.
Nothing that he says, thinks, or does is without consequences.
Writing a century before Cousins, Robert Louis Stevenson—as adept at penning pithy aphorisms as he was at writing adventure stories—said it even better:
Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
Throughout history, analogies, metaphors, and similes have been extremely helpful when people have tried to describe life’s drama and adventure, its joy and tragedy, and even its dark and seamy side. In the remainder of the chapter, let’s continue our figurative foray into the human condition.
When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him,
he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.
The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self,
a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.
Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress.
Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, and didn’t, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
The world’s battlefields have been in the heart chiefly;
more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet,
than on the most memorable battlefields in history.
Adversity has the same effect on a man
that severe training has on the pugilist:
it reduces him to his fighting weight.
In the 1860s, Shaw adopted the pen name Josh Billings and became famous for his cracker-barrel philosophy and aphorisms written in a phonetic dialect (he called them “affurisms”). Mark Twain was a fan, and once even compared Billings to Ben Franklin. In an 1851 speech, William Cullen Bryant said similarly: “Difficulty…is the nurse of greatness—a harsh nurse, who roughly rocks her foster-children into strength and athletic proportion.”
Mountains appear more lofty the nearer they are approached,
but great men resemble them not in this particular.
Living at risk is jumping off the cliff
and building your wings on the way down.
Prejudice is the psoriasis of the human condition:
it’s unsightly and it never completely vanishes,
but with a little care we can keep it under control.
Every person’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures
or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of that person.
If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom,
then the emotions…are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.
No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly;
and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.
A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas,
any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.
Alcohol is like love: the first kiss is magic,
the second is intimate, the third is routine.
After that you just take the girl’s clothes off.
Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough,
as drunken men are apt to think themselves sober enough.
We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self.
Men deal with life as children with their play,
Who first misuse, then cast their toys away.
There are some people who leave impressions
not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water.
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary.
It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body.
It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship,
which illumine only the track it has passed.
In a related observation, W. R. Inge wrote, “Experience is a good teacher, but her fees are very high.”
Common men pass treasures by;
they respond to the spectacle of nature
as guests at a banquet who are neither hungry nor thirsty.
What is man, when you come to think upon him,
but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning,
with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?
Along the same lines, Christopher Morley once penned this thought: “A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.”
Trying to predict the future is like
trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights
while looking out the back window.
There is a great deal of unmapped country within us
which would have to be taken into account
in an explanation of our gusts and storms.
This comes from Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda. Blaise Pascal communicated the same notion more than two centuries earlier when he wrote, “The heart has reasons that the reason knows not of.” The point of both observations is that the motivation behind much of our behavior—especially our occasional outbursts and eruptions—is beyond our conscious awareness.
There are men too superior to be seen except by the few,
as there are notes too high for the scale of most ears.
Also writing about great men (and women), Kahlil Gibran wrote, “The lights of stars that were extinguished ages ago still reach us. So it is with great men who died centuries ago, but still reach us with the radiations of their personalities.”
The fundamental principle of human action—
the law that is to political economy what the law of gravitation is to physics—
is that men seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion.
God has placed in each soul an apostle to lead us upon the illumined path.
Yet many seek life from without, unaware that is within them.
Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling
for the strength of their argument.
The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.
A reputation once broken may possibly be repaired,
but the world will always keep their eyes on the spot where the crack was.
Men heap together the mistakes of their lives,
and create a monster they call Destiny.
There are thoughts which are prayers.
There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body,
the soul is on its knees.
The richest genius, like the most fertile soil,
when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds.
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
To a person uninstructed in natural history,
his country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery
filled with wonderful works of art,
nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.
Viewing nature as an art gallery with ninety percent of the paintings turned to the wall starkly describes the average person’s ignorance of the natural world.
The chess-board is the world;
the pieces are the phenomena of the universe;
the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature.
The player on the other side is hidden from us.
We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient.
But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake,
or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue
is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.
Most people live…in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
They make very small use of their possible consciousness,
and of their soul’s resources in general,
much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism,
should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning
is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object,
takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.
Your morals are like roads through the Alps.
They make these hairpin turns all the time.
There is always some frivolity in excellent minds;
they have wings to rise, but also stray.
Great talents are the most lovely
and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity.
They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.
Trying to help an oppressed person
is like trying to put your arm around somebody with a sunburn.
There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys;
they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book
without having worked out the sum for themselves.
Adversity draws men together and produces beauty
and harmony in life’s relationships,
just as the cold of winter produces ice flowers on the window panes,
which vanish with the warmth.
In another memorable window pane metaphor, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote: “People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”
In my youth I regarded the universe as an open book,
printed in the language of equations,
whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink,
of which in our rare moments of grace we are able to decipher a small segment.
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.
This world is a great sculptor’s shop.
We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop
that some of us are some day going to come to life.
For happiness one needs security,
but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person’s mind,
she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.
The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains,
are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn.
The desire for success lubricates secret prostitutions in the soul.
Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul
that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.
Nature may abhor a vacuum, but according to Mann, ignorance loves them. Also thinking about the monsters bred by ignorance, Goethe wrote, “There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”
Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.
The human mind treats a new idea the same way
the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
The childhood shows the man,
As morning shows the day.
This comes from Paradise Regained (1671). The basic notion is that early indicators are great predictors of what is to come. William Wordsworth made the same point in a famous line in his 1807 poem “My Heart Leaps Up”: “The child is father of the man.”
What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot,
into which each culture, each system of science and religion,
each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived
from the shape and color of the blot itself.
Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them
and cover them up, at least a little bit.
The naked truth, a metaphor for plain and unadorned truth, originated in an ancient Roman fable. Truth and Falsehood went for a swim. Falsehood emerged from the water first, dressed in Truth’s clothes, and departed. Truth refused to wear the clothing Falsehood had left behind, preferring to go naked instead. The expression has been used countless times by writers, ancient and modern, but one of my favorites comes from Ann Landers, who wrote, “The naked truth is better than the best-dressed lie.”
The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world.
Nin is also widely quoted as saying, “We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.”
There are people who so arrange their lives
that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
Living is like working out one long addition sum,
and if you make a mistake in the first two totals
you will never find the right answer.
He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth,
like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.
In other words, lengthy explanations are often a smoke screen that people hide behind. This observation from Ray, a seventeenth-century English naturalist with a great fondness for proverbs, may have inspired one of George Orwell’s best-known lines: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
The world is…a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions
of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.
Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of
comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by
some reader’s hand in the margin are more interesting than the text.
The world is one of these books.
In the country of pain we are each alone.
The point is that we can never truly understand the pain of another person. On the same subject, William Cullen Bryant wrote, “Pain dies quickly, and lets her weary prisoners go; the fiercest agonies have shortest reign.” And on pain’s brief reign, Katherine Mansfield wrote, “As in the physical world, so in the spiritual world, pain does not last forever.”
We are not unlike a particularly hardy crustacean….
With each passage from one stage of human growth to the next
we, too, must shed a protective structure.
We are left exposed and vulnerable—but also yeasty and embryonic again,
capable of stretching in ways we hadn’t known before.
Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
To suppose, as we all suppose,
that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave,
is like supposing that we could drink all day and keep absolutely sober.
Human beings cling to their delicious tyrannies,
and to their exquisite nonsense, like a drunkard to his bottle,
and go on until death stares them in the face.
Smith, an English clergyman in the early nineteenth century, was a popular essayist and lecturer. He inspired the phrase “You can’t put a square peg in a round hole” in an extended metaphorical passage that may be found at www.metaphoramor.com.
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night
is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow-necked bottles:
the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out.
This was likely based on a famous analogy from Plato: “As empty vessels make the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest babblers.”
Although men are accused for not knowing their own weakness,
yet, perhaps, as few know their own strength.
It is in men as in soils, where sometimes
there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
As the internal-combustion engine runs on gasoline,
so the person runs on self-esteem:
if he is full of it, he is good for the long run;
if he is partly filled, he will soon need to be refueled;
and if he is empty, he will come to a stop.
The world is a looking-glass
and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.
This is from Vanity Fair (1847–48). The passage continues: “Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.”
For every ten people who are clipping at the branches of evil,
you’re lucky to find one who’s hacking at the roots.
Everyone is a moon,
and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
This is from Following the Equator (1897). More recently, Faith Baldwin wrote: “We, too, the children of the earth, have our moon phases all through any year; the darkness, the delivery from darkness, the waxing and waning.”
One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul
and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.
Passersby see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney
and continue on the way.
A flaw in the human character
is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management.
Marshall McLuhan said similarly, “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.” And earlier, R. Buckminster Fuller wrote, “The most important thing about Spacecraft Earth—an instruction book didn’t come with it.”
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse.
I only owe it to the horse’s good nature
that I am not thrown off at this very moment.