Reading time: About 2 minutes
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of metaphors from Patrick Bringley….
Two friends and a distant family member had recommended a new book by Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World. I found the memoir engaging, intellectually interesting and also a bit sad. (The author’s brother dies, which is a pivotal event in the book.)
But most of all, I found the figurative language Bringley employed to be exquisite. Here are my favourite examples:
- A woman arrives to meet me, a guard I am assigned to shadow, called Aada. Tall and straw-haired, abrupt in her movements, she looks and acts like an enchanted broom.
- She pushes through the crash-bar of a nondescript metal door and the colors switch on Wizard of Oz -style as we face El Greco’s phantasmagoric landscape, the view of Toledo.
- She depresses the half-dozen switches at once and we are standing in a long dark tunnel, Renaissance paintings turned into silvery muddles on the walls. She flips the switches up and the lights kick on a gallery at a time with surprisingly loud ka-chunks.
- A short line of people has formed to query Aada and I have a moment to peer down into the cavernous Great Hall. A kind of salmon run of visitors ascends the grand staircase toward me.
- The mornings are church-mouse quiet. I arrive on post almost an hour before we open and there was no one to talk me down. It’s just me and the Rembrandts. Just me and the Botticellis.
- I would learn, too, the rhythms of the week: this was a Monday so calm. The pace would quicken until Thursday’s rush of brick-wall deadlines, followed by Friday’s post-coital collapse.
- For the few minutes I smoked I was Huck Finn, a dropout, just regarding a bend in the river, wider, deeper, and even less concerned with my opinion than I could say. I said nothing.
- Throughout my halting explanation the man listens to me hungrily. He is a rare person, one who doesn’t pretend knowledge or fear ridicule, who throws the gates of his mind wide open and invites a battalion of new ideas to crash in.
- For tourists especially, the city and everything in it feels Christmassy from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day and they glide about the galleries like ice-skaters at Rockefeller Center.
- Tara’s cell phone rang and she picked up the call. “Saara!” said Tara, her Brooklyn accent suddenly flowing like harbor water under the Verrazano Bridge.
- It can be ludicrous out here on 5th Avenue when the sun shines and the apartment towers gleam and doo-wop singers pass the hat and taxi cabs streak by like dandelion smears.
