Well, I've been won over. The more I think about the metaphor, the more I believe it works.

At last, it seems, we have wrestled this murky metaphor to the ground.

Perhaps, in the process, we have discovered a "new world" of metaphors, and Faldage has become our Magellan.

In the past, writers used metaphors like a magnifying glass to elucidate difficult ideas. A good metaphor was seen as one which made the arcane, the abstruse, even the ineffable, accessible to ordinary readers.

What we have discovered is a strain of metaphor which confounds the reader at first blush, and obliges him or her to contemplate the navel of the universe, so to speak.

If Faldage has the distinction of being our Magellan in this "new world" of metaphors, may I claim the distinction of naming it? Inspired by the passage which follows, I christen this variant the talmudic metaphor.

"In the Talmudic method of text study, the starting point is the principle that any text that is deemed worthy of serious study must be assumed to have been written with such care and precision that every term, expression, generalization or exception is significant not so much for what it states as for what it implies."

There may not be much call for "talmudic metaphors" in our everyday world but, somewhere, at the boundary between "what is", and "what is not" [just as we deciphered at the boundary between evaporation and condensation], Schroedinger's cat will always land on its feet.

There is something reassuring about this. At least, for me.