ALLEGORY: A LIGHT CONCEIT
483
feel a slight nausea looking out from the train station through the
gray smoke-dust at the dreary water tower and grain elevator and
an oil tank or two, and they would rather not bother, only it is a
part of their job. Perhaps they decide after all that it wasn't worth
the stop. Thus the angels holding a hurried meeting might look to
our observer, who stands gaping through the bushes like a barefoot
child peeking through a fence at the oil committee, feeling that not
only is he in no danger of being caught, but that he cannot make
his presence known to them. That there is in fact no way he can get
their attention, even he who has received the grace of vision.
He might then describe in his story a staff of fat, sleepy gods
in dingy office suits who live in a mist-hidden stronghold on a hill,
from which all roads seem to slink and sidle away. They never come
down except for some unavoidable business matter; they conduct all
their affairs on tons of paper, which they stuff into bursting files, and
they have no information about mortals except through dreary and
dusty reports, indirectly forwarded, which are always wrong, always
misplaced, and usually never read.
At any rate, the man who saw would tell his story as best he
could, modified by however he viewed and felt about the spectacle,
and by the possibilities and limitations of whatever kind of world he
lived in, as well as his own possibilities and limitations. And people
would listen because
in
spite of all he had done to tame it, it would
still be an awesome and marvelous story. Some of his listeners would
take it to mean just what he said, and they would ask wonderingly,
"Did that really happen? Were there really men with wings who
flew from the sky to the ground, and could make people do whatever
they wanted, and then disappear?" Or, "Is there really a bunch of
indifferent mortgage-closers up there who tangle up our lives in a
bad filing system?" Others among the listeners would say he lied, that
he knew it wasn't so and had just made it up out of his head-which
charge, awkwardly enough, he would be in no position to deny. But
a few would see that he was really trying to talk about something
else; they might even puzzle out a little of what it was he was trying
to talk about.
An
allegory
is
a kind of yarn made up to inveigle its audience
into a larger idea, and the obvious difference between it and a lie
is that it is always meant to lead, whereas a lie is meant to mislead.
