I find the writing of Carlo Rovelli beautiful, such as this passage from “The Order of Time”
“I do not fear death. I fear suffering. And I fear old age, though less so now that I am witnessing the tranquil and pleasant old age of my father. I am afraid of frailty, and of the absence of love. But death does not alarm me. It did not scare me when I was young, and I thought at the time that this was because it was such a remote prospect. But now, at sixty, the fear has yet to arrive. I love life, but life is also struggle, suffering, pain. I think of death as akin to a well-earned rest.”
As a writer, I note that there is no use of metaphor or of simile in this exquisite passage. In fact, as I look at quotes from his work, Rovelli rarely uses this device. One example where he did, though, felt so new and fresh to me that I used the simile for a post title: “We inhabit time as fish live in water“:
I stop and do nothing. Nothing Happens. I am thinking about nothing. I listen to the passing of time.
This is time, familiar and intimate. We are taken by it. The rush of seconds, hours, years that hurls us toward life then drags us toward nothingness…. We inhabit time as fish live in water. Our being is being in time. Its solemn music nurtures us, opens the world to us, troubles us, frightens and lulls us. The universe unfolds into the future, dragged by time, and exists according to the order of time.
Now to “dying metaphors” and lessons on writing from George Orwell, courtesy of this wonderful twitter thread from “The Cultural Tutor”. In the thread, the Cultural Tutor lays out Orwell’s six rules for writing. Today I highlight from the thread:
Rule #1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Orwell is talking about *dying* metaphors here, not ones which have already lost their original meaning.
An example of that is “deadline”, which originally referred to the physical line around a prison which, if a prisoner crossed it, would result in that prisoner being shot. Deadline has lost such imagery. It’s no longer a metaphor. It has a literal meaning. That’s fine.
The problem with *dying* metaphors is that they haven’t become literal yet. But by being overused their imagery turns stale. They lose all “evocative power”, as Orwell says. An example is something like “Achilles’ heel”.
Using these dying metaphors is lazy. It shows that the writer neither cares about the vividness of their language nor the accuracy of what they are actually saying. Why use somebody else’s fading imagery when you can invent your own & stimulate your reader’s imagination?
This is a constant theme in Orwell’s advice: that using phrases created by *other people* is one of the worst things a writer can do. That, by so doing, a writer (or speaker) becomes a mere machine of regurgitation, hardly even conscious of what they actually think.