How to Move a Mind: Barry Lopez on the Power of Metaphor Over Data

What it takes “to think abstract problems through on several planes at the same time, to stay alert for symbolic and allegorical meanings, to appreciate the utility of nuance.”

For all their ravishing beauty, numbers remain abstractions cold and austere without a foothold of similitude in the living world, the world of touch and sight, of things and thingness. Seven has no meaning to the human mind without an object — we need to know seven what in order to fathom its sevenness. This may be why ...