Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories. Narrative imagining is a literary capacity indispensable to human cognition generally. This is the first way in which the everyday mind is essentially literary. The prototype of conceptual projection is metaphor , but there are other forms of conceptual projection. Conceptual projection is, like story, a fundamental instrument of thought.
Rational capacities depend upon it.
It is a literary capacity indispensable to human cognition generally. This is the second way in which the everyday mind is essentially literary. The combination of story and projection gives us a basic cognitive instrument used everywhere, from simple parables to complex literary creations like Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. He knew the languages of beasts and birds. In one of his stalls he kept an ox and a donkey.