I've had my issues with Leon Wieseltier - haven't we all? - but this, I thought, from today's review of the Bellow letters, was excellent:
Metaphor is the juxtaposition of disparate elements of the world in which an unsuspected commonality, an illuminating partial likeness, has been discovered, and the more unlikely the juxtaposition, the greater the consequent sensation of the unifying of the world; and so the range of a writer’s metaphor is a measure of the range of his cognition.
I'll share that one with my students tomorrow night.
I've been quiet the last few days - work on the novel has resumed with real purpose, churning out my own metaphors. I'm bearing down hard on finishing up Part One (there are two parts), and so I will close up shop here a bit early as I travel east for the holidays. But I'll be back around December 1, talking about my latest obsession - Tony Judt's almost unbearably lovely The Memory Chalet. Until then, cook the stuffing outside the turkey, friends.