Ready (Metaphor)
John says Elizabeth to “gird your lions” before the award ceremony. He means that she should get enough strength in order to cope with all stress and amount of attention she is going to get. She is not longer young and this means that she is not as energetic and strong as she used to be. Some quiet time is supposed to help her to be as ready as possible.
Rich (Metaphor)
John meets this married pair during one of numerous social events. They want to tell him how much their daughter is fond of his mother’s works. He immediately notices that they have “look of money, old money”, which means that they are “benefactors”. The phrase about old money indicates that they probably inherited their money and never had to work to earn them.
Among the greatest (Metaphor)
When Elizabeth’s book was published, she couldn’t even imagine that she would be “rubbing shoulders with the other Cs”. This metaphor indicates that she couldn’t imagine that her books would stand on the same shelf with the books of Carlyle and Chaucer.
Kooks’ attraction (Simile)
As soon as Elizabeth finishes her lecture and time for questions starts, she notices the woman, who raises her hand to ask a question. She looks like a crazy one and Elizabeth knows that nothing good is going to happen. She should have learned by then that “public lectures draw kooks and crazies like flies to a corpse”.
Like a disease (Simile)
Zumthor writes that “Europe has spread across the world like a cancer”. What he means is that courtesy of numerous wars the culture of Western Europe has been adopted by the representatives of other cultures. Then the culture of Western Europe became a dominating one.
Almost weightless (Simile)
When Elizabeth meets her sister after a long period of time, she notices that Blanche is as “scrawny as a hen”. She serves in the Marian Order and spends a lot of time praying or working, not to mention that a nun shouldn’t eat a lot. She could look like a model when she was young, but now she is too old to be that skinny, at least according to Elizabeth.
