“The Physics of Human Nature”
A fictional book is referenced within this story titled The Physics of Human Nature. The structure of the book is based upon metaphorical concepts:
"The Law of Relative Gravity": Lighten up. A problem is only as heavy as you let it be.
"The Doppler Effect of Communication": There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean.
"The Centrifugal Force of Arguments": The farther you move from the core of the problem, the faster the situation spins out of control.
The Keller Effect
It is a one of the tragedies of the 20th century that most people only know Helen Keller as a little girl with an anger problem and access to a water pump. The truth is that the adult Ms. Keller was one of the most admirable citizens of the world. The word genius gets tossed around a lot. Suffice to say, it is far more appropriate for describing Helen Keller than, say, Kanye West or Andy Warhol:
“They treated her as though she were Helen Keller, a genius who didn't let injury keep her from showing how smart she was. Like Helen Keller, she simply had to work harder, and perhaps this was what made her smarter, the effort and others' admiring that.”
Mothers and Daughters
This is a novel by Amy Tan, a statement that has almost come to be synonymous with meaning it is a story about mothers and daughters. Not that there’s anything wrong with finding a niche like that. Especially when the results speak for themselves. But because the novel is working in that realm which the author seems to know so well, a metaphorical statement by a daughter about her mother like the following is less easy to dismiss as simply mean-spirited:
“Dementia was her mother's redemption, and God would forgive them both for having hurt each other all these years.”
"Chaos is the penance for leisure."
This quote from the book carries such a fundamental philosophical force that one might be inclined to expect that it carries great meaning in the text. Perhaps it is a character’s personal motto which has been transformed into a motivational poster hanging on the wall. Or, perhaps, it is just a bit of ageless philosophical wisdom handed down through the generations and repeated by multiple characters. What a surprise, then, to find it just once, spoken out loud by a character as a throwaway line amidst the chaos which stimulates it.
Media and Messages
In this virtual world where the means of producing ideas have become less and less tangible, it is easy to forget there is always a connection between hardware and the ideas produced. Give a person a pencil, one sheet of paper, thirty minutes, and a writing assignment and see how much more coherent the result than from the person given a pen. Something along this same idea is expressed far more poetically through metaphor here:
“That is the problem with modern ink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming on the top of your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn.”
