“We hurry into meanings. We have difficulty staying in a state of not knowing, a state that is essential to reverie. Not knowing is an eros moment, and if we linger there, psyche begins to speak spontaneously.” 

Russell Lockhart, Psyche Speaks

Beautiful things point to Absolute beauty… This is the true discipline of loving or being loved - that a man begin with the beauties of world and use them as stepping stones for an unceasing journey to that other beautiful creatures to beautiful lives, and from beautiful lives to beautiful truths, attaining finally to the true knowledge itself, and so know at last what beauty is.

Plato, Symposium

Olds has never been comfortable saying definitively, as metaphors do, that something is something else. She ascribes this to her terrifying childhood experience of religion, the idea that blood was wine, that body was bread. To this day, she clings to the comforting distance of that “like”. Blood is like wine, yes; body is like bread, sure — in the same way that a poem is like a real experience but not the thing itself. In the same way that death is like birth, sorrow is like joy, a poet is like a host, an ending is like a beginning. To have a simile brain, as Olds does, is to live in a world of radical interconnection, a world in which nothing stands alone, nothing is ever only itself. And yet everything, in that vast network of mutual meanings, is allowed to remain exactly itself.

Sam Anderson, in a New York Times article on Sharon Olds