Only in terms of other things No legislation could prevent the making of verbal pictures: God walks in the garden, He stretches out His arm, His voice shakes the cedars, His eyelids try the children of men. To forbid the making of pictures about God would be to forbid thinking about God at all, for man is so made that he has no way to think except in pictures. But continually, throughout the history of the Jewish-Christian Church, the voice of warning has been raised against the power of the picture-makers: “God is a spirit”, “without body, parts or passions”; He is pure being, “I AM THAT I AM”. The fact is, that all language about everything is analogical; we think in a series of metaphors. We can explain nothing in terms of itself, but only in terms of other things. Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker Metaphors We Live ByYou only understand something relative to something you already understand metaphoranalogy
The strange familiar and the familiar strange The problem solver, when confronted with a new and yet unsolved problem, overlays the structure of the unsolved problem with an apparently similar problem with which he or she is experienced. Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange are also principally based on the use of analogy. Peter G. Rowe, Design Thinking metaphoranalogy
One Tenth of a Second An Article by Venkatesh Rao studio.ribbonfarm.com The details are fascinating, but the central argument — that the birth of modernity can be traced to a meta-crisis spawned by the 0.1s problem — is worth understanding and appreciating whether or not you’re a time nerd like me. There is no convenient leitmotif, comparable to the 0.1s problem, for our contemporary version of the rhyming conditions, but something very similar to the “tenth of a second crisis” is going on today. I suspect our Great Weirding too involves some sort of limiting factor on human cognition that we haven’t yet properly wrapped our minds around. It isn’t reaction time, but something analogous. timeanalogyprogresscognition
A Slow Boat to China A Short Story from The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami Can you even call it memory?Never any place I was meant to be
Can you even call it memory? My recall is a damn sight short of total. It’s so unreliable that I sometimes think I’m trying to prove something by it. But what would I be proving? Especially since inexactness is not exactly the sort of thing you can prove with any accuracy. Anyway—or rather, that being the case—my memory can be impressively iffy. I get things the wrong way around, fabrication filters into fact, sometimes my own eyewitness account interchanges with somebody else’s. At which point, can you even call it memory any more? memory
Never any place I was meant to be Supposing I found myself chasing another fly ball and ran head-on into a basketball backboard, supposing I woke up once again lying under an arbor with a baseball glove under my head, what words of wisdom could this man of thirty-odd years bring himself to utter? Maybe something like: This is no place for me. This was never any place I was meant to be. melancholywisdomage