Concord
This is a work in which figurative language sometimes get so dense it can threaten to overcome the narrative. A reader can easily find within it the capacity for getting so caught up in the beauty of the trees that they forget they are in a thick forest. In another work by another writer, this description of Concord might represent the height of imagery, but here it is just another description a Virtuous character with fantastic hair:
“Her hair, more glittering than gold, keeps its place of its accord, arranges itself and does not look for the comb’s aid, but able to look after itself, lies in such order that the breath of Boreas blowing through cannot disturb it or cause a tangling disorder in it.”
A New Manly Kind of Man Who’s Manly
The New Man is complete: body built by Nature, soul provided by God. But he is a reboot, after all, and must be taught to avoid the abominations that Nature herself outside the borderlines of what is orderly and acceptance. Constancy, another of the Virtues, steps in to, rather ironically, guide the New Man on how to behave like a proper man…including hair care:
“She secures his gait with regular tread to prevent him from mincing his steps and touching the earth with his toes but barely making contact with earth-bound things. Lest hair, ever-ornamented with excessive treatment, reach the level of feminine excess and rob his sex of its honored position, or lest it hang disheveled, deformed by dirt”
Ye, God
In the case of the description of God, the use of imagery is really a case of form matching content. Half the story is about the effort just to gain a meeting in heaven with the only tech giant capable of making a soul to put into an empty body. And getting there is no picnic. Only the most special of specials get to look upon Him in all His glorious wonder and the descriptive imagery almost collapse beneath the weight of attempting to accurately capture and convey this wondrousness:
“He is the one, abiding, simple, eternal power, the fount, the splendor, the form, the way, the strength, the end, the origin, the unfathered father, living in God, one and only creator, one in essence, three in person; how He remains uniquely one in one in three, three in one.”
The Chariot
The difficulty in arranging a deal with God has much to do with the simple issue of transport. How does one get to heavy, anyway? Nature puts the Virtues to work constructing a chariot and that alone takes up a good chunk of the story. The payoff is that the imagery which brings the chariot and the ride to heaven upon it to life represents some of the most vivid writing in the text:
“if Phronesis should mount the chariot while the horses are unsubdued, they would run awry, leave the appointed course, follow byways, shake the yoke loose, undo the fastening and the whole structure becomes unstable, the chariot totter, the joints fail, the girths slacken, the articulations grow loose, the reins be dropped and the entire framework of the chariot collapse.”
