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somewhat amusing, the second statement is not only unwieldy, but utterly absurd. Yes, we might imagine a master poet of Dada who could pull off this line in a poem, and therefore we hesitate to exclude it from art for all eternity. Yet barring the rare appearance of such a master, there is nothing but sheer literality when we read “a cylinder or block of wax or tallow with a central wick that is lit to produce light as it burns is like a person who teaches, especially in a school.” Like every definition taken in isolation, this joint definition is structured as a literal identity. But since under normal circumstances the combined identity is patently false, we are not sure what to make of the statement. Though we mentally repel the second statement in the same way that we hold all nonsense at a distance, we do not do the same with the original poem, even if we regard it as cloying kitsch. “A candle is like a teacher” is somehow able to draw us into its atmosphere to a sufficient extent that we take it with at least provisional seriousness. We see immediately that this is not a literal statement of the sort we expect from scientific or other knowledge. But what makes the two cases different?

      A literal statement treats objects, explicitly or not, as interchangeable with a list of the qualities it possesses.22 Imagine speaking with someone who had somehow managed to go through life without ever hearing the word “candle,” despite a relatively large overall English vocabulary. In such a case, we could repeat the dictionary definition and instruct this person that a candle is a cylinder or block of wax or tallow with a central wick that is lit to produce light as it burns. This definition gives knowledge about what a candle is. It does this by deflecting our attention away from the candle itself in two opposite directions. First, it undermines the candle by telling us what it is made of: “a cylinder or block of wax or tallow with a central wick.” Next, it overmines the candle by telling us what it does: “[it] is lit to produce light as it burns.” In the effort to instruct our ignorant acquaintance, the candle is treated as purely equivalent to the sum of its physical composition and its external effects on the world at large. The same holds for the definition of a teacher. If somehow our friend also does not know what “teacher” means, we can give him this knowledge by moving in the same two directions. Looking downward (undermining) we find that a teacher is “a person,” since human beings are the raw material from which all teachers so far have been made. We can also look upward (overmining) to learn that the teacher is someone who “teaches, especially in a school.” Here once more we gain knowledge, and knowledge always entails that an object is replaced by an accurate description of its components, apparent properties, or relations. No aesthetic effect occurs, and hence there is no beauty. We have nothing but paraphrase: nothing but literalism. There is no sense of any surplus in the candle or the teacher that goes beyond what we get from adequate definitions of them. Even if these definitions leave out numerous additional details about candles and teachers, we are already on the right track, and cease defining them further only because we have already conveyed enough information for the person to grasp what we mean.

      Consider the following three statements: (1) “A professor is like a teacher.” (2) “A candle is like a teacher.” (3) “The demographic makeup of Los Angeles at the time of the 2010 census is like a teacher.” Which of these is a good candidate to work as a metaphor? Number 1 is out of the question in most cases, since it is merely a literal statement that points to numerous banal properties shared in common by teachers and professors. With number 3 we have the opposite problem. The two terms appear so unrelated that no aesthetic effect occurs when we hear the sentence: though again, perhaps a poet or comedian of genius could make it work, given the right set-up. Number 2 seems closer to a happy medium, one in which candle and teacher have some connection, though it is not entirely clear what that might be. Perhaps it has something to do with the way that both “bring light” in different senses of the term. But once this is made too explicit, we have again entered the realm of the literal comparison of qualities, and the metaphor immediately falls apart. Imagine the following lines by a poet who should have quit while she was ahead: “A candle is like a teacher, because candles literally bring light to a room, and teachers figuratively bring light to the minds of students.” We now have little more than an annoying platitude. For metaphor to occur, there must be a connection between its two terms, but it must be non-literal and should not be made too explicit.

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