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Walter Humes
Do they know yet? Photograph by Islay McLeod
Two seemingly unrelated events have led me to reflect on metaphors of life and living. The first was attendance at a funeral. It was a non-religious service with music and personal tributes.
The deceased had led a successful life, both professionally and personally. After retirement he had time to pursue sporting interests but continued to do some work in his specialist field and was very supportive of younger colleagues. In his 80s he developed health problems, from which he initially made a good recovery but, when cancer set in again, he declined further treatment. If life is to be thought of as a journey, he had decided that he had reached his destination.
The second stimulus was a statement in Richard Holloway’s memoir, ‘Leaving Alexandria’. Very early in the book he writes: ‘The toughest lesson life teaches is the difference between who you wanted to be and who you actually are. And it can take a whole life to teach it’. The surface metaphor here is that life is an educative process, not confined to childhood but lifelong. There is also a submerged metaphor in the reference to an imagined life (‘who you wanted to be’), with the implication that this might be illusory, a deception that prevents you from being true to yourself.
The pervasiveness and variety of metaphors of life and living is striking. A variation on the journey metaphor is ‘life is a highway’. At each junction choices have to be made. Some may be made unconsciously, with little regard for the consequences. Others may involve uncertainty and deliberation, with anxious reflection on what might have happened if another route had been followed (‘The road not taken’ in Robert Frost’s poem of that title). It is an image that fits many circumstances – eg, career paths, marriage, and financial decisions.
Darwinian metaphors have been very powerful, perhaps because they appear to have a scientific basis and can be used to justify actions that might otherwise seem insensitive or cruel. Thus we hear of life being a struggle or a competition, in which the survival of the fittest is the order of the day. It is asserted that animal nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’ and there is no reason to suppose that human nature is different. This argument can be used to mount a case for aggression and war, ruthlessness in business and the pursuit of self-gratification in personal dealings with others.
Quite a different perspective emerges from the notion that life is simply a game. It all depends on the hand you have been dealt. Some people are lucky, others are not. There is no point in thinking too deeply about tomorrow, or planning too far ahead, as fortune can raise you up or cast you down at the spin of a dice. Those who are inclined to take this view would be unimpressed by attempts to distinguish between games which require intelligence and strategy, and those which depend entirely on luck and chance. The game analogy is invoked as a fatalistic counterweight to attempts to ascribe deep meaning to human life.
Another metaphorical strand can be found in references to life as a mystery. This is consistent with some religious interpretations of experience. Behind the material world there is something more substantial which we can never fully understand in this life. It may be revealed to us in the afterlife (the exact form of which we cannot anticipate or know). We should remain open to insights into this other world (through religious texts, for example), and to intimations of a spiritual dimension conveyed through art, literature and music. Learning to live with life’s uncertainties and ambiguities is, on this view, a sign of maturity.
The potential power of metaphors is also suggested by the availability of self-help courses which claim that if you want to change your life, it’s a good idea to change your metaphorical repertoire. In most cases, the advice that follows is pretty simplistic: replace negative images (life is a prison, a puzzling maze, a minefield) with positive ones (life is a box of chocolates, a bed of roses, an exciting adventure). The fact that there is a market for such courses does, however, indicate that many people are unhappy with their current state and are seeking new ways of interpreting their existence.
The range and diversity of life metaphors is, at one level, simply a reflection of the range and diversity of human experience. No one image can capture fully how we feel about the sense of being alive, and what might suit one set of circumstances would be inappropriate in another context. But the attraction of metaphors is also indicative of the limitations of literal language, its inability to capture the elusiveness of what it means to be human.
The cynical, non-metaphorical statement ‘Life is just one damned thing after another’, does not take us very far. That is why we reach for something that goes beyond the literal, that tries to convey, however imperfectly, our attempt to extract meaning from the hopes, fears, successes and disappointments that make up most people’s lives. It is also why, when we encounter a writer with the ability to create fresh images of life, we gain new insights into the human condition. Like arguments by analogy, life metaphors should be regarded as illustrative, not conclusive. Their explanatory power may be limited but we seem unable to do without them.
Walter Humes held professorships at the universities of Aberdeen, Strathclyde and West of Scotland and is now a visiting professor
of education at the University of Stirling
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