Metaphor. I learned about it in middle school englishclass, in our poetry unit. "he's a tiger on the field", said Ms. Athorn. "this is not to be confused with 'he's like a tiger on the field', which is a simile". I thought this was neat and wrote my little class poem, but i didn't think very deeply about the implications of this seemingly simple language tool. The idea of metaphor, after all, was nothing new. I had grown up with it, though I hadn't known its name. Nothing was ever what it appeared to be, especially for imaginative little me. I was famous for "metaphorical outfits", each articel representing something different- a feeling or a season. As you can imagine, these fashion artworks results were garishly clashing and tragically incomprehansible to anyone but myself. But I deeply understood their significance. Every child takes this ability for metaphor for granted. It's only natural that a stick should be a sword, a rocking horse a noble steed. But it is this ridiculous ability that seperates humans from the rest of the animals.

When an animals looks at the world, it sees necessities: food, shelter, mate, predator. It sees things for their immediate significance and reacts accordingly: eat, strut or run. Beyond that, they dont try to explain or compare the world around them. Humans see the world as more than what it is. We draw connections between what they experience, connections which are not at first obvious. This ability helped us to hunt more creatively, with weapons that might not even look like weapons to an animal. it requires metaphorical thinking to see a string on a stick as a weapon, but the bow and arrow provides more forward thrust than any arm could, and allows it from a safe distance. It also gives us art and religion and religion and myth. These are the keystones of our being, so it's hard to imagine any intelligent species, especially one so closely resembling our own, not having the ability to think this way. However, we have to remember that the entire world lives that way- seeing the world for what it is and how it immediately effects them. While we percieve our way of life to be better, we are only capable of judging from our own standard, in which the presense of religion, excess and unncessary food, and art, which is fundamentally inpractical, play a central role. Ours is a beautiful and leisurly life compared to the animals, and we enjoy that. But we have to remember that everything else in the world is happy the way they are. So dont pity the Neanderthals, because they're judging by a different standard, and they're doing great.