After that we were silent awhile. Then I tried again. “You know your trick of waltzing with a glass of water on your head?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I wonder if we couldn’t do that with our souls.”
“That suggests to me a rather curious picture,” said Jonathan.
“Well—you know what I mean. When you do that, your body takes up all the jolts and jiggles before they get to the top of your head, so the glass stays quiet.”
“Well—”
“Well, I don’t see why—only, of course, our souls aren’t really anything like glasses of water, and it would be perfectly detestable to think of carrying them around carefully like that.”
“Perhaps you’d better back out of that figure of speech,” suggested Jonathan. “Go back to your princess. Say, ‘every man his own mattress.’ ”
“No. Any figure is wrong. The trouble with all of them is that as soon as you use one it begins to get in your way, and say all sorts of things for you that you never meant at all. And then if you notice it, it bothers you, and if you don’t notice it, you get drawn into crooked thinking.”
“And yet you can’t think without them.”