 In working this out, we activate and begin to explore a complex and potentially fruitful analogy between the way a person’s physical and intellectual powers wax and wane over the course of a single human life and the way the sun’s powers wax and wane over the course of a single day, between the way individual human lives repeat each other with variations in the course of an extended human lineage and the way individual days do so over the course of a year, and so on. The effort to recover a simple metaphorical meaning (evening) for the term “old age” calls forth a beneficial, pleasurable, complex intellectual effort from us. The sentence we thereby come to understand may say something simple and unambitious that could easily be said without resorting to metaphor, but the effort to recover this meaning has a cognitive value transcending that of the meaning itself. Something happens to the terms on which we access our own thoughts about days and how they run: evening is set before our eyes in the suggestive and instructive guise of an elderly human being. For discussion see Ricoeur (1997, 9–43), Lloyd (1996), Moran (1996), Halliwell (2003, 189–191). On ancient rhetoric and poetics more generally, see the entries  Aristotle’s Rhetoric  and  Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry  in this encyclopedia.