Tall and Skinny - A Metaphor for Life

Narrow Passage to a Secret Garden, Charleston, SC  © Doug Hickok


This view through a tall skinny opening, down a narrow passageway, reveals a beautiful garden. The passage is a piazza that belongs to one of Charleston's old antebellum mansions which opens along Meeting Street. Normally the doors to this mansion are closed, keeping the garden hidden from view.

You may be wondering what the rest of the mansion looks like. But if that bit of knowledge is withheld or unknown, then this narrow view becomes a kind of metaphor for human knowledge. Or more precisely, the lack of it. Because, so often our knowledge of life is limited to what we can see, what we think we know. We make decisions everyday based on our "view down the passageway." As Hamlet famously said, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Verily I say. Verily.