Word: metaphoric
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...culminating moral of the book, drawing superficially on the age-old metaphor of the stage of life, throws Prose's sensibilities for her characters into sharp relief. Looking through a window onto the world's future, Isabella agrees with the angels: human life is "just a series of stories and plays, most of which are exactly the same!" There is no reason to regret a bad life if it is "all just a story." Although reluctantly, Prose does allot Isabella a two-sentence demurral to finish the book: she wonders how the Glorious Ones' yearnings for earthly fame fit into...
Brecht had read a German novel about Chicago and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle just before he started to write In the Jungle of Cities. A jungle is an apt, if overused, metaphor for the most grotesque, competitive aspects of a city--John D. Rockefeller, invoking Darwin to describe his goals for the capitalist economy, suggested how apt the comparison can be--and Brecht populates his jungle with Baboon and another henchman cleverly named Worm to emphasize the point. But otherwise he ignores the real psychology of city life in order to concentrate on the petty idiosyncracies of his characters...
...looking on a real sea in (one imagines) some provincial resort on the Belgian coast. But what is that boulder doing there with every pore and crack of its surface emulated in Magritte's slow, gray pigment to remind us of its equal reality? It is intolerable: no metaphor provides an exit, no rational explanation will do, while the very technique of Magritte's drawing and painting keeps denying the presence of fantasy...
...ride down from the crater's lip to the center of the city is not only an unusual topographical experience, but a striking sociological one as well. In fact, the layout of La Paz can be viewed as a metaphor for the stark contrasts between wealth and poverty that pervade all Latin American societies. Dug into the stony walls near the top of the canyon are the most wretched hovels, those of the peasants most recently arrived from the altiplano. The weather in this part of the city, which is 12,500 feet above sea level, is pleasant...
...unicorn cycles, praise is an impertinence. They vary in conceptual density. The Cluny Lady with the Unicorn set is a relatively straightforward metaphor of the five senses, so that the mythic beast gazes at itself in a mirror to signify Sight. By contrast, the Cloisters' unicorn hunt is a highly complicated and frequently obscure allegory of the passion of Christ, mixed with references to courtly and profane love. But in each, a way of seeing reality that was both freshly direct and symbolic is embedded in a matrix of almost unbelievable formal beauty. Detail by detail, this...