I know I'm getting a bit carried away posting today. But I want to share another dollop of James Willis' generously shared wisdom. I've just read this and felt very touched... then very amused. It from Chapter 7 of Friends in Low Places.

A charming and courteous gentleman of the old school, a remarkable amateur naturalist whose encyclopaedic knowledge of plant names was slowly and tragically deserting him, stood with me in his hall ten minutes after he had found his wife dead in their shower. In his thread-bare tweed jacket he swayed a little against his stick as he contemplated the fact that he had drawn the longer of the two straws they had held together for so many years. Slightly the longer.

‘The sun has gone in. I always called her my sunshine.’

What can I say?

When words fail, we use analogy. An analogy has to be a word or phrase of which we know we already share an understanding with the listener. Thus we all understand the enormously rich complex of ideas and feelings evoked by the word ‘sunshine’ and understand deeply the significance of this description when applied by husband to his beloved wife...

When the poet says ‘My love… is like a red, red rose’, he is taking two concepts that he knows the listener already has and inviting him to allow them to interact... The poet continues by enhancing the image of his love by exposing it to further patterns of ideas: ‘melody… sweetly played… in tune…’

How could any listener fail to understand what makes the poet so enthusiastic about his love?

How much richer a means of communication this is than if he had said, ‘My girlfriend is incredibly wonderful!’.

But how infinitely richer than saying ‘My girlfriend is more wonderful than 99.97% of the female population aged between sixteen and thirty four in Chipping Norton and surrounding parishes.’!

But the last method is the one by which the increasingly reductionist, literal, mechanical, artificial world in which we live has to communicate its ideas.