Every effective metaphor brings with it a more complete perception of the world and its interrelationships. It reveals more truth, it brightens, expands, clarifies—in effect, it helps to create—our understanding of the world. Through metaphor we receive “in addition to the moment or moments of aesthetic pleasure in appreciation…a more permanent boon. It is as though my own consciousness had actually been expanded.”
— Carol Zaleski and Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
A good metaphor is a pry bar on the skull: suddenly more light gets in, more joints show between things we thought were separate. You don’t just admire the phrase; you find yourself able to notice what you couldn’t notice five minutes earlier. That experience — what Barfield called a felt change of consciousness — is the afterglow of meaning being made. For me, the most foudroyant sense of truly understanding a subject happens when I see it captured in a metaphor. Suddenly, an isolated subject clearly fits into the wider world. Do I quote myself? Very well; I quote myself: “an apt metaphor is to language what the invention of the wheel was to labor — a means of carrying heavy concepts with minimal effort. A prescient metaphorical picture is worth a thousand words of academic detail.”