Imaginary Reefs
“The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands.”
Jose Ortega y Gasset
The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel
According to Ortega’s theory, the metaphor is born in the human instinct to avoid realities. A simplistic but effective way to describe what follows in his thoughts about art would be to say that this instinct is also the motor of contemporary art, a motor refueled with the creative power of the metaphor.