The Senior Common Room was unusually peaceful.
No fabric had been brought in.
No billiard balls had appeared.
No tools had been wheeled through the door.
No Wellington boots stood by the fireplace.
No keyboards had been connected to anything remotely cosmic.
Professor Quillibrace noticed this immediately.
"Something is wrong."
Miss Stray looked up from her book.
"Wrong?"
"Everything is functioning normally."
"Is that unusual?"
"With Mr Blottisham involved, yes."
As if summoned by the observation itself, the door opened.
Mr Blottisham entered.
Empty-handed.
Professor Quillibrace stared.
"No."
"Good morning, Professor."
"You have nothing."
"Nothing?"
"No equipment."
"No."
"No diagrams."
"No."
"No picnic hamper?"
"No."
Professor Quillibrace sat down slowly.
"I confess..."
"...I do not know whether to be relieved or concerned."
Blottisham smiled.
"I have been thinking."
Miss Stray closed her book.
"Ah."
"About the metaphors."
Professor Quillibrace looked cautious.
"Go on."
"I think I may have misunderstood something."
A silence followed.
Miss Stray looked at Professor Quillibrace.
Professor Quillibrace looked at Miss Stray.
"Did you hear that?"
"I did."
"Should we record it?"
"Perhaps frame it."
Blottisham ignored them.
"I assumed that when physicists said..."
He counted on his fingers.
"Fabric."
"Billiard balls."
"Machines."
"Fields."
"Computers."
"...they meant those things."
Professor Quillibrace nodded.
"Yes."
"And they don't."
"No."
"At all?"
"No."
Blottisham looked astonished.
"Then why say them?"
Professor Quillibrace smiled.
"An excellent question."
He walked to the blackboard.
He wrote:
THE UNKNOWN
Then beneath it:
THE FAMILIAR
"And between them..."
He drew an arrow.
"...a metaphor."
Miss Stray nodded.
"When we encounter something genuinely unfamiliar, we have no language ready-made for it."
"So we borrow."
"Exactly."
Blottisham considered this.
"Like a temporary bridge."
Professor Quillibrace looked pleased.
"Very good."
"But then..."
Blottisham continued,
"...we must remember that a bridge is not the destination."
"Precisely."
Miss Stray smiled.
"I think you have finally understood."
Blottisham looked proud.
"I do have one remaining question."
Professor Quillibrace sighed.
"Naturally."
"If everyone knows these are metaphors..."
"Yes?"
"Why does everyone keep forgetting?"
The room became quiet.
Professor Quillibrace sat down.
"Because good metaphors disappear."
"Disappear?"
"Yes."
"The best tools become invisible."
Miss Stray added:
"When you walk across a bridge, you do not spend your time thinking about the bridge."
"You think about where you are going."
"Exactly."
Blottisham nodded.
"So a successful metaphor hides itself."
"Yes."
"And that is the danger."
"Yes."
"Because eventually someone like me comes along."
Professor Quillibrace smiled.
"Precisely."
"And asks..."
He raised his hand dramatically.
"Where are the seams?"
Miss Stray laughed.
"Where are the sheep?"
"Where is the workshop?"
"Where is the keyboard?"
The room filled with laughter.
After a while, Professor Quillibrace returned to the blackboard.
"I think we should add one final principle."
He wrote:
A METAPHOR IS NOT A FAILED DESCRIPTION
Blottisham looked at it.
"What is it?"
"A successful instrument."
"Like a telescope?"
"Yes."
"But a telescope does not contain the stars."
"No."
"It helps us see them."
"Exactly."
Miss Stray smiled.
"And perhaps metaphors are intellectual telescopes."
"They let us see structures that would otherwise remain invisible."
"But they are not themselves the universe."
Professor Quillibrace nodded.
"Precisely."
The room fell silent.
Blottisham looked thoughtful.
"So the mistake was not using metaphors."
"No."
"The mistake was forgetting we were using them."
"Exactly."
The afternoon light entered through the windows.
For a moment, nobody spoke.
Then Blottisham stood.
"I think I should return something."
Professor Quillibrace looked concerned.
"What?"
Blottisham reached into his pocket.
He placed a small USB stick on the table.
Professor Quillibrace stared.
"What is that?"
"The backup reality."
A long silence.
Miss Stray looked at him.
"Why do you still have it?"
"In case."
"In case of what?"
Blottisham considered.
"Metaphorical failure."
Professor Quillibrace laughed.
"That..."
"...is perhaps the most appropriate use of it."
They left the Senior Common Room together.
The fabric was folded away.
The billiard balls returned to their case.
The tools went back into the wheelbarrow.
The picnic remained uneaten.
The keyboard was never connected.
Yet nothing had been wasted.
Because each experiment had revealed something important.
The fabric had shown that space is not cloth.
The billiard balls had shown that particles are not tiny objects.
The machine had shown that mechanisms are not necessarily machines.
The field had shown that fields need not contain sheep.
The computer had shown that information is not always stored somewhere.
The metaphors had not failed.
They had done their work.
They had carried human imagination into places it had never been before.
Professor Quillibrace paused at the doorway.
"Mr Blottisham?"
"Yes?"
"I have a confession."
"What?"
"I rather enjoyed the experiments."
Blottisham smiled.
"I suspected."
"How?"
"Because every time I asked a ridiculous question..."
"Yes?"
"...you answered it."
Professor Quillibrace considered this.
"That is an annoyingly fair observation."
Miss Stray closed the door behind them.
The Senior Common Room returned to silence.
On the blackboard, one final sentence remained.
THE PURPOSE OF A METAPHOR IS NOT TO REPLACE REALITY.
IT IS TO HELP US FIND OUR WAY TOWARDS IT.
And somewhere in the college corridor, Mr Blottisham could be heard asking:
"Professor?"
"Yes?"
"If the mind is a network..."
A pause.
Professor Quillibrace stopped walking.
"No."
"But I haven't asked anything yet."
"No."
"Fair enough."
And for once...
Everyone was relieved.
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