Metaphor is like a minute, motorized boat, capable of pulling colossal understanding about infinite things through the eye of a needle; raising the bar of consciousness and awareness in a way impossible without the model, the vehicle which metaphor provides.
There are some things that are just too big for us to understand in their raw reality. We may have a core-of-our-being inkling or even confidence that such too-big things exist, but our minds approach them sidelong, like a crab, not head-on, because to approach such understandings head on would be like trying to eat a fully grown elephant in one bite. Overwhelming. Seemingly impossible.
Infinity is one such concept. The concept of infinity; an infinite thing, an infinite being, and infinite-ness - these are all concepts that extend beyond the places which our eyes can comfortably see, they stretch past the places our minds can readily conceive ... yet we have a core-of-our-being inkling and confidence that infinity exists. We are able to conceive of a thing whose boundaries our mind must recognize are beyond the reaches of our very minds. We can understand the concept of it, without being able to fully encompass with our minds the reality of it. Sometimes we might even want to talk with someone else about it ... in fact sometimes it is only in the ability to share the concepts with another that we are reassured that we have not stepped off into the realms of insanity.
So we need a language with which to express these profoundly enormous, core-of-our-being inklings and understandings with others; a way to tentatively put feelers out into the world to see whether the things we conceive of in our very core are present in the cores of others; a means of sensing whether what we sense inside exists beyond the boundaries of our very selves. We need a language. A language that can make something really big manageable for the mind, manageable for conversation, manageable for debate so our understanding can be further honed ... we need a way to speak about things bigger than our minds can fully conceive of ... we need a way to help us make the big become a little bit smaller.
This Sesame Street video has always appealed to me because of how it helps to put things in perspective:
Metaphor is indeed like a minute, motorized boat, capable of pulling colossal understanding about infinite things through the eye of a needle. It allows the big to become the little, and helps us to see the little as the small, so we can indeed say "that's about the size of it".
In engineering we use numerical equations to represent realities that are inexpressible in words.
Those equations are simply the engineer's metaphorical language. For everything else, for everyone else, there is metaphor :)
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