[MD] What is an analogy?

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[SA]
I live in a hilly woodsy region.  At the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
 So, not too far west it gets pretty flat.  Many people around here say how
boring the flatland is to the west.  What subtlies in the land would the
flatlanders notice about flatland that I don't readily notice?

[Arlo]
I hear ya. Here in Central Pennsylvania I'm in love with the mountains,
especially the largely unpopulated regions to the North. I lived in Chicago for
a while, with the Lake being the only thing that kept me from going flat-crazy.

Pirsig talks about this briefly in ZMM. "Memories of car trips across them are
always of flatness and great emptiness as far as you can see, extreme monotony
and boredom as you drive for hour after hour, getting nowhere, wondering how
long this is going to last without a turn in the road, without a change in the
land going on and on to the horizon."

"Hard country" is how Pirsig referred to the Dakotas. I read a few years back an
intriguing book called "Dakota, A Spiritual Geography" by Kathleen Norris. In
it she talks about relocating to a small prairie town, her initial misgivings
and how she eventually came to not only love, but embrace, life on the
flatlands. 

In Neil Peart's motorcycle travelogue, "Ghost Rider", he describes crossing
Manitoba and Saskatchewan along Canada Highway 1 and The Yellowhead Highway. As
with Pirsig's crossing the Dakota's, Peart describes the flat emptiness broken
only by grain elevators, but also with a nod to a unique beauty that arises
from such seemingly barren places. (I've never been to Manitoba or
Saskatchewan, but one of these years that's going to change, when I make out
for the Northern Rockies Lodge and Muncho Lake
(http://www.northern-rockies-lodge.com/), one of Peart's stops on his way to
the Inuvik in the Arctic Circle.)