10
" Poem (the spirit likes to dress up) The spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes,shoulders, and all the rest at night in the black branches, in the morningin the blue branches of the world. It could float, of course, but would ratherplumb rough matter. Airy and shapeless thing, it needs the metaphor of the body,lime and appetite, the oceanic fluids; it needs the body’s world, instinctand imagination and the dark hug of time, sweetness and tangibility,to be understood, to be more than pure light that burns where no one is –so it enters us – in the morning shines from brute comfort like a stitch of lightning;and at night lights up the deep and wondrous drownings of the body like a star. "
12
" If through no fault of his own the hero is crushed by a bulldozer in Act II, we are not impressed. Even though life is often like this—the absconding cashier on his way to Nicaragua is killed in a collision at the airport, the prominent statesman dies of a stroke in the midst of the negotiations he has spent years to bring about, the young lovers are drowned in a boating accident the day before their marriage—such events, the warp and woof of everyday life, seem irrelevant, meaningless. They are crude, undigested, unpurged bits of reality—to draw a metaphor from the late J. Edgar Hoover, they are “raw files.” But it is the function of great art to purge and give meaning to human suffering, and so we expect that if the hero is indeed crushed by a bulldozer in Act II there will be some reason for it, and not just some reason but a good one, one which makes sense in terms of the hero’s personality and action. In fact, we expect to be shown that he is in some way responsible for what happens to him. "
― Sophocles , The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
20
" War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the “right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might. "
― Ursula K. Le Guin , A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)
