"Just as birds are lifted up into the air by their feathers and can remain wherever they wish, the soul in the body is elevated by thought and spreads its wings everywhere."
— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)
Author
Work Title
Date
1999
Metaphor
"Just as birds are lifted up into the air by their feathers and can remain wherever they wish, the soul in the body is elevated by thought and spreads its wings everywhere."
Metaphor in Context
The only bad thing about New Orleans was the heat. At night, we filled bath towels with ice cubes and held them to our wrists. When it was too hot to sleep, my mother read to me for hours from the natural history of St. Hildegard. About birds, St. Hildegard wrote:
Birds are colder than animals that live on the earth, because they are not conceived in such intense and heated desire. Just as birds are lifted up into the air by their feathers and can remain wherever they wish, the soul in the body is elevated by thought and spreads its wings everywhere.
(p. 186)
Birds are colder than animals that live on the earth, because they are not conceived in such intense and heated desire. Just as birds are lifted up into the air by their feathers and can remain wherever they wish, the soul in the body is elevated by thought and spreads its wings everywhere.
(p. 186)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Jenny Offill, Last Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1999).
Date of Entry
11/10/2015
