Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (29 page)

Jumping up to such a rarefied level of abstraction as a quest for some ultimate meaning of a proverb is reminiscent of a person who would label every object in sight a “thing”, a “thingy”, a “deal”, or a “whatchamacallit”, and thus would be prone to coming out with such abstract observations as “The thingy is sitting on the deal in the whatchamacallit”, whereas most of us would find it clearer and more useful to say, “The pen is sitting on the desk in the living room.” The greater specificity of the latter sentence strikes us as obviously preferable to the ambiguity of the former, but it’s a matter of taste.

This recalls the cartoon figures called “smurfs”, who have a highly abstract and concise lexicon, in which all nouns are covered by the super-abstract term “smurf”, and other parts of speech are treated somewhat similarly. For example, they might enthusiastically announce, “We’re off to smurf a smurf tonight!”, and even if one didn’t fully get the meaning of this utterance, it would be hard not to be caught up in the general feeling of excitement. And if the smurfs have a stock of proverbs, then it would contain such pearls of wisdom as “A smurfing smurf smurfs no smurf.” Perhaps for the smurfs themselves, this phrase would be filled with insight, but for us its meaning remains elusive.

The problem with having only such an abstract mental lexicon — such a rarefied set of concepts — is the paucity of distinctions that it allows to be made, somewhat like the severe paucity of oxygen at rarefied altitudes. Abstraction has its virtues, which we will point out at an appropriate moment, but if one cannot draw distinctions, then thinking becomes as difficult as breathing at the top of Mount Everest.

Even if we forget about people who steal eggs and oxen, the notion that things can become bigger and better over time is everywhere to be found around us, for after all, grownups were once children; today’s multinational giants were once fledgling outfits; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak made the first Apple computer in a garage before going on to found their legendary firm; Sergey Brin and Larry Page incorporated Google in a
humble dwelling in Menlo Park; Albert Einstein first learned to read and write before developing his theories of relativity; popes were once priests in little churches; conquerors of Everest climbed small hills before moving on to the big time; major acts of philanthropy were preceded by minuscule acts of charity; every great friendship was once just a tentative affinity; virtuoso instrumentalists were once musical novices; every chess master had to learn the rules at some point; powerful ideas gave rise to modest fruit before resulting in huge advances… All of this is far from egg-stealers turning into ox-stealers, but it nonetheless deserves a proverb or two, along with the rich category that any proverb covertly symbolizes.

How might “He who will steal an egg will steal an ox” be converted into a more upbeat thought? The key question is to pinpoint the core idea that one wishes to capture in this category, since various possibilities, related but distinct, might be imagined. The most general version would simply be the idea that things on a large scale are the fruits, in some fashion or other, of a process of “amplification”.

Thus, amplification can come from putting together a number of small items: a big thing is the “sum” of many little things. There are numerous proverbs that capture this idea in some form or other. For example: “Many a mickle makes a muckle” (whatever those items might be!); “Many drops make a shower”; “United we stand; divided we fall” (which paints both an optimistic and a pessimistic picture); “E pluribus unum”. All of them get across the idea that individually insignificant entities, when put together in large numbers, can give rise to entities of great magnitude and strength.

However, in none of these is time’s flow explicitly involved. If we are looking for an optimistic counterpart to the pessimistic egg-thief-to-ox-thief metamorphosis, then our goal is a proverb highlighting the slow but steady process of evolution or growth of a single good thing over a very long time. Thus we have the famous proverb “Mighty oaks from little acorns grow”, and a more elaborated version of this thought, from eighteenth-century English writer David Everett: “Large streams from little fountains flow, tall oaks from little acorns grow.”

A related notion of amplification over time involves putting together many small acts (or objects), one by one, over a very long period of time in order to accomplish a grand goal — in short, temporal accumulation: “A long journey starts with a single step”; “Rome wasn’t built in a day”; “Little and often fills the purse”; “Drop by drop fills the tub” (or, seeing things in a time-reversed fashion, “Drop by drop the sea is drained”, which, in French, is a genuine proverb); and finally, in a more destructive vein, “Little strokes fell great oaks”, a homily found in
Poor Richard’s Almanac
by Benjamin Franklin.

A clear semantic reversal of “He who will steal an egg will steal an ox” is illustrated by the fund-raising style of American universities, which might be summarized as “A little giver will one day a grander giver be”, or, more poetically, “Mighty donors from humble tippers grow.” Or then again, “Someone who donates a book today may donate a library tomorrow”, or even “Butter up a million, smile and snag a billion.” Finally, to give it a more antique tone, we might rephrase it thus: “A giver of eggs may one day give an ox.” Or a camel. Or a dromedary. Or a dormitory.

So far in this chapter, we have been discussing acts of categorization that result in the retrieval of composite lexical entities or ready-made phrases, including compound words, idiomatic expressions, ready-made sentences, and proverbs. In particular, our discussion of people’s effortless understanding of proverbs they hear and their fluent insertion of proverbs into conversations was intended to bring to light some of the memory-access processes that we all engage in automatically and ceaselessly, processes that transpire in but fractions of a second and with truly impressive precision. This fluid fashion of tapping into deep, dormant reserves of memory is a variety of virtuosity, and far from being limited to a few gifted and highly trained individuals, it comes along free with the possession of a normal human brain.

Telling one’s loudly protesting children in the back seat that it’s important to fasten their seat belts, one comes out spontaneously with the phrase “Better safe than sorry” without having had any prior intention of quoting a proverb. Hearing from friends who returned from a weekend vacation to find that their teen-age daughter had thrown a wild party in the house during their absence, one finds oneself thinking, “When the cat’s away, the mice will play!” Advising a friend who’s applied for several long-shot jobs of which one has suddenly come through and needs an instant reply or it will be lost forever, one blurts out, quite off the cuff, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush!” (We momentarily interrup the natural flow to remind readers that in
Chapter 1
we announced our intention to distinguish linguistic expressions from the concepts they denote by using quotation marks or italics, respectively. In this paragraph, though, all the examples are delicately poised between the two; indeed, they are all cases of the category named by the phrase “neither fish nor fowl”. But we had to make a choice, and so, throughout the paragraph, somewhat arbitrarily, we opted for quote marks.)

Just as words like “bottle”, “table”, and “chair” strike us as being objectively
there
, staring us in the face, when we are in the presence of certain visual stimuli, so the various proverbs that we have just cited above (and many others as well, needless to say) can, on occasions like those just cited, simply materialize out of thin air in our minds, as if handed to us on a silver platter — and when this kind of effortless, instantaneous retrieval happens, they simply feel
right
, every bit as right as calling the objects in front of us “a bottle”, “a table”, and “a chair”. On such occasions, the members of the abstract category seem to us to be objectively
there
and objectively
real
— just as real and almost as visible and tangible to us as are the material objects before our eyes, even though, of course, they are not visible or tangible in the way physical objects are. No less than there are seat belts and children in the back seat, there is a
Better safe than sorry
situation inside the car. No less than there is a frightful mess of half-empty beer bottles and a bevy of reveling teen-agers in the living room, there is a
When the cat’s away, the mice will play
situation in the house. No less than there is a job offer dangling in cyberspace and a threat of losing it forever, there is an
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
situation floating in the air. As these examples demonstrate beyond any doubt, categories go far beyond what is labeled by single words.

The further we’ve gone in this chapter, the longer the labels of the categories concerned have grown. First we discussed words such as “pacifier”, “understand”, “handsome”, “cockpit”, “cupboard”, “wardrobe”, “pocketbook”, and “eavesdrop”; these words are made of components that are no longer felt as such by those who use them fluently, so that the compounds have a unique flavor all their own, reminiscent of a process of sedimentation in which the initial constituents have all melted together, or of a rich, tasty sauce that is so subtle that only an expert chef can figure out what went into it. Then we looked at compounds whose components seem more transparently present, such as “bedroom”, “airport”, “bottlecap”, and “Jewish mother”. Next, we moved to prefabricated idiomatic phrases like “to drop the ball”, “to catch the drift”, “to be caught off guard”, and “to jump on the bandwagon”. Then we moved on to short ready-made sentences such as “What’s up?” and “It could be worse”, and most recently, to proverbs such as “Better safe than sorry”. At every stage of the game, our point has been firstly that such expressions are the names of categories in our minds, and secondly that, thanks to analogical perception, we feel the presence of instances of those categories no less than we feel the presence of instances of categories whose linguistic labels seem far more atomic, like “table”, “chair”, “moon”, “circle”, “office”, “study”, “think”, “spend”, “much”, “and”, “but”, and “hub” (and whose presence we also detect through analogical perception). This is a quintessential theme of this book.

So how about fables, now — short fanciful tales that wind up stating a moral? Might those, too, be the names of categories? We shall answer in the affirmative — not just sometimes, but in all cases, as long as the fable is clearly understood. Reading a fable allows one to construct a category that is succinctly summarized by its moral; the fable itself is just one member — a very typical member — of the category, among a myriad potential members. After the fable has been understood, then, as is the case for any category, new situations will from time to time be encountered that, thanks to an analogy perceived, are seen to have a common essence with the fable, and will thus add to the category’s richness.

From then on, a fable will act much like a word. It becomes a label that jumps to mind when someone who has incorporated it in their memory runs into a situation that “matches” or “fits” the fable — not in a word-for-word fashion, obviously (fables are seldom memorized), but by an abstract alignment with its moral, or with its title, or just with a blurry memory of its basic plot. If a flat surface comes into view off of which a person is seen eating food, this is very likely to trigger the word “table”; if a few children come into view who are playing hopscotch, this is very likely to trigger the word “jump”; in much the same way, there are certain combinations of actors and events in which they participate that are very likely to trigger the retrieval of certain fables (or of fable-labels, at least). Our claim — a very serious one — is that fables jump to mind as situation-identification labels no less than do proverbs, idioms, compound words, and “simple” words, and any situation that evokes the memory of a particular fable will be perceived as a very real member of the category that lurks behind the scenes.

Æsop is remembered for the fables he wrote in the sixth century B.C., of which one of the most famous is “The Fox and the Grapes”. It was so successful that it passed down through the æons and was even adapted by a number of later authors who, despite changing its form, retained its content. The Roman fabulist Phædrus included it in his collection of Æsop’s fables in the first century A.D., and in the seventeenth century, the French poet–fabulists Isaac de Benserade and Jean de La Fontaine did the same. Here are the versions by these four authors, all translated into English: