It seems to be agreed by those who know that what we call thinking is a kind of comparing. When we think, we are trying to understand what something is, to consider how it may be like or unlike something else we already know. And in thinking about a larger problem involving many things, we are simply connecting one comparison to another comparison, building up an understanding in the same way we might knot threads to make a net: each node is a comparison, a thought, and taken all together they comprise a context to comprehend in the ensemble.
One kind of comparison is called a simile, with which we intend to show how one object may be like or as another. We use similes all the time to express our thoughts, and one way to understand how they work is to compare the simile to another kind of comparison called a metaphor. (The term metaphor means carry across in its original Greek, and so the picture is that we are taking something as it is in one context and bringing it unchanged into another context.) Where the simile compares two objects, the metaphor identifies them. I might describe someone of uncommon self-possession and arresting presence by saying that he sits in his chair like a king on his throne, and in putting my thought that way, I would be employing a simile. But if I said instead, with perhaps a bit of annoyance, he’s a king on a throne when he sits in his chair, I am not comparing this person with another, but rather saying that the two objects, person and king, are one and the same—at least in the world of my conscious imagination.
Simile and metaphor are two figures of speech in the linguistic rhetorical kit to design and style sentences. Figures, or a better term might be configurations, of speech are ways of arranging language to convey its rational meaning in a vital image, embodying an idea the way a body incarnates a human presence. To say that someone sits in a chair like a king on a throne phenomenalizes the baldly factual statement he looks self-possessed and unapproachable when he is sitting in his chair. A simile has more energy about it than the identifying metaphor, at least in the sense that comparing two different things will imply tension or conflict, because two objects are never the same in every respect and two things which are truly identified as one thing are never in conflict with each other. No conflict, no energy.
To see how the simile can be handled masterfully, let’s look at a passage from the British writer Charles Morgan’s novel The Fountain. This work of Morgan’s, along with another entitled Sparkenbroke, we could call a philosophical novel; both are slow moving, deep, and reaching works about inalienably human concerns, in this novel love and in the other death. In The Fountain, the protagonist, Lewis, after a conversation with an old “incurious” aristocrat who “hated the labour of imagination,” marvels at a mind so gravely closed down to life and its beauty. He was one of those men, Lewis is thinking here, who are
capable of cutting distractions out of their lives as a gardener cuts out weeds, thus enabling the narrow plots of their activity to be sturdy, ordered and fruitful. But to live with such a man and in a world commanded by him?
The conjunction as establishes the simile, and what makes this so well constructed an instance of it is the elaboration of thought which the comparative image makes possible. The old aristocrat had certainly cultivated his mind with all the singlemindedness a gardener does his plots, but what depth it had was at the expense of sympathetic breadth. To be sturdy and ordered and fruitful all have their place and virtue, and we can respect the work accomplished across a life to achieve those depths, as we do the gardener’s patient effort and its bounty. But such a close simile gives us pause in the end as we wonder whether the gardener’s necessarily narrow plots show up merely as an unnecessary narrow-mindedness when the old aristocrat stands (as perhaps too an old king sits) by comparison.
A beautifully and thoughtfully drawn simile, energetic in its compression and fruitful in its implications. A good writer thinks abstractly but expresses concretely, ever the difficult needle to thread. When we can write, as Morgan did, with such poise that our common voice carries an uncommon timbre, rich and resonant, we’ll know we’re on our way.
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