Metaphors are my playmates. I love them as one loves one’s playmates, whose participation enables us to compete, exercise, sweat pleasurably. My saddest regret at aging (so far) has been loss of tennis. The intimacy of such strenuous camaraderie is inconceivable to those who’ve never felt it. I loved these guys for forehands, backhands, locker-room jocularity, wiles on the court – loved not amorously, but companionably – only guys then weren’t supposed to talk about love.

With metaphors I’m forever wrestling, sweating pleasurably, never alone. A metaphor, as you know, is a likeness between distinct and incompatible entities, an imaginative yoking. An unfamiliar metaphor forces the mind to get busy adjudicating – how might a love “be like a red red rose”? Almost every word was a metaphor before it became an idea. The word metaphor combines ancient Greek concepts of carrying (-for) and sharing (meta). A metaphor carries a comparison, like a monkey on its back.

I write by metaphor, analogically rather than logically. This wasn’t a choice, just how my mind wanted to go. Logical prose puts my mind to sleep – instructions, rules, lawyers’ briefs. If I can’t imagine it, I can’t understand it. I could never have been an engineer. Words for me are colors to combine, each daub a feeling. I cook the same way, a little of this, a little of that, season to taste.

Metaphors repudiate precision. A likeness is a suggestion, not an argument. This suits me fine, for I don’t believe anything is knowable. When we think we’re thinking, we’re feeling our way in the dark. When God visited me, folks naturally wanted to know what He was like. The smell of freshly baked apple pie on a cold day was the best I could come up with, hardly a basis for theological disputation.

Metaphors strain my brain like nobody’s business. Just now I am gazing at Henry on the carpet beside my work-bed. He is studying me. He wants to play and can’t understand my dedication to that aluminum box which looks like no fun at all. What does the box have that he doesn’t! His quizzical stare from behind his bushy eyebrows and bristling whiskers, that bright amber eye-glint amidst milk-chocolate fluff, his intent curiosity suggestive of deep yet innocent sagacity… how with words can I show you what he means to me! How can I prevent my description from deteriorating into plodding precision or saccharine gush! It’s a sport, this depicting, as inconsequential as tennis, yet somehow it matters that I play my best.

My dog-love – and yes, you’re allowed to love a pet – resembles not in the least a red red rose or God’s apple pie, rather a loose-limbed plop onto a warm soft bed after a depleting day, a consoling reassurance the world is worth its woes. Henry – like Jane, like our grandkids, like a sweet sip as we settle into supper, like the sky, like anything good – repays distress with joy. Courage, friend, it murmurs, Soldier on.

Does this muddle of metaphors do justice? Of course not. Gladness is untranslatable. But as with prayer, best attempts please God more than amplitude of offering. It feels good having tried.

Emerson wrote, “Parts of speech are metaphors because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” I share this bewildering concept. Everything resembles because everything partakes of an unfathomable whole: call it “life,” say, or “God.” Metaphors feel out the filaments that connect all to all. Sweaty tennis, a red red rose, warm apple pie, milk-chocolate fluff, and a soft bed after a bruising day are all related.