Metaphor

C. S. Lewis is a master of the apt metaphor. This page is a collection of instances of such metaphors.

Miracles 4.9 **Waterlilies** in a pond as a metaphor for deeper connections of reality, used to relate to the fact that Reason (the waterlily, points to a deeper connection that is the source of the existence of the waterlily, (sic) God.) Miracles 4.13 **An interesting metaphor:** __God as keeper of elephants__ and Nature as a rebellious elephant. Miracles 6.2 Metaphor of the **Announcer**: describing the frontier between Nature and Supernature as limited by the state of the brain or the state of society "In the same way the voice of the Announcer is just so much of a human voice as the receiving set lets through." Miracles 6.2 Metaphor of the **Map**: the two points of view of a frontier "bulge in Devonshire is really a dent in Cornwall" "What we call rational thought always involves a state of the brain, in the long run a relation of atoms." Miracles 6.4 While not exactly metaphors, certainly analogies: __Garden seen through a Window__, Reading without attending to one's eyes, speaking without attending to language, the Redskin who doesn't think his native language has a grammar are all used as examples of why we can have the Supernatural and not be overwhelmed by it. In other places Lewis uses the analogy of the __fish in water__ not really attending to the water, because it is his native place. [reference] Also these examples are instance of looking at versus looking along -- see the essay Mediation In A Toolshed Miracles 4.1 Metaphor of **Understanding**: "... as the understanding of a machine is certainly connected with the machine but not in the way the parts of the machine are connected with each other. The knowledge of a thing is not one of the thing's parts."

Have you ever met a person who talks habitually in metaphors and doesn't know that they are metaphors? He has certainly the perverseness and troublesomeness of speech which betoken greatness: his poems are like rooms full of exotic and insolent ornaments, but with nowhere to sit down. //Collected Letters//, to his brother, 10 May 1921

If we are going to talk at all about things which are not perceived by the senses, we are forced to use language metaphorically. Books on psychology or economics or politics are as continuously metaphorical as books of poetry or devotion. //Miracles//, chapter 10, paragraph 10

All language about things other than physical objects is necessarily metaphorical. //Is Theology Poetry//? 5th paragraph from the end

All language, except about objects of sense, is metaphorical through and through. To call God a 'Force' (that is, something like a wind or a dynamo) is as metaphorical as to call Him a Father or a King. On such matters we can make our language more polysyllabic and duller: we cannot make it more literal. //God in the Dock// Part 1 Chapter 6, Horrid Red Things, 3rd paragraph from the end

They just thought it was the ordinary way of translating thought into what they suppose to be 'literary English'. Thousands of people are no more corrupted by the implications of 'urges', 'dynamism', and ‘progressive' than they are edified by the implications of 'secular', 'charity', and 'Platonic'. The same process of attrition which empties good language of its virtue does, after all, empty bad language of much of its vice. //Christianity and Culture//, chapter 3, paragraph