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Behold! human beings living in I could move a bit. The padded iron hoop around my forehead
a underground den, which has
a mouth open towards the light
was fastened to a wooden post resting loose in its posthole, so I
and reaching all along the den; could stand up—to the length of my arm and leg chains—and sit
here they have been from their back down again, the post rattling up and down with me. Most of
childhood, and have their legs
and necks chained so that they the time I sat on a cushioned board, my legs drawn in. The board
cannot move, and can only see lay across a bucket, and I could remove the board when I wanted
before them, being prevented by
the chains from turning round to use the bucket. When I was done I would tell the higher beings
their heads. and an angel would come to empty the bucket. Angels fed me
too, by hand.
Understand that I am using words as I now comprehend them. We prisoners chattered all the time
but our conceptual reach was limited. At the time I did not know what a chain was, or that there
were directions one might look other than “forward.” To me, standing, removing the board, these
were biologically necessary. I did not conceive of the bucket or the board as separate from my
self. I did what I’d been told I had to do. In fact, I did not conceive of my “self” as located around
and mostly below the apparatus that saw the world, as I do now; I
Above and behind them a fire located myself in my shadow, cast on the wall ahead.
is blazing at a distance, and
between the fire and the prison-
I suppose that if I’d had many physical impressions to contend
ers there is a raised way; and with I might have had trouble maintaining a sane, stable idea
you will see, if you look, a low of myself at all, split between where I saw myself and where I
wall built along the way, like the
screen which marionette play- received sensations, but in fact there was very little to sense. I
ers have in front of them, over was fed the same thick, nourishing but tasteless mush at the same
which they show the puppets.
times every day, and shat it back out again on more or less a
There are men passing along the
wall carrying all sorts of vessels,
regular schedule. As instructed, I stood for fifteen minutes every
and statues and figures of ani- other hour, along with all my mates, I assume to militate against
mals made of wood and stone pressure sores on our buttocks and thighs.
and various materials, which
appear over the wall. Some of *************************************
them are talking, others silent.
The prisoners see only their own At the time, I divided the world into three classes of beings: low,
shadows, or the shadows of one high, and angelic. Low beings, like me, were toward the bottom
another, which the fire throws on
the opposite wall of the cave.
of the projection wall. A low being always kept the same shape
And of the objects which are be-
ing carried in like manner they
only see the shadows.
If they were able to converse
with one another, would they not
and the same voice. He could move himself slightly, but he could
suppose that they were naming not move anything else, and he always sat in the same place.
what was actually before them? There were about thirty of us.
And suppose further that the
prison had an echo which came High beings, those that floated at the top of the wall, were not so
from the other side, would they restricted. My mother and father were high beings. She usually
not be sure to fancy when one
of the passers-by spoke that the appeared as a ball atop a triangle, like this: He was usually a
voice which they heard came ball atop an arrow: But my mother could assume many shapes,
from the passing shadow?
and spoke with many voices. When I was young and didn’t see
To them, the truth would be her I would call out and she might answer from the shape of a
literally nothing but the shadows
of images. lion, or a square, and I would only know it was her because she
said so. Many of the other low beings also had mothers who
looked like most of the time, and I didn’t know whether we all had the same mother or dif-
ferent ones. I asked my parents where I came from and they told me the same kind of story all
children hear: they had made me out of their love, and when I grew up I would become like them.
Angels were those who could move from high on the wall to low and back. When one came to
feed me, for example, it would appear to my left, very large, and then shrink to my level and size.
When it was done dealing with my needs it would grow larger and larger until it winked out.
*************************************
We had “days” separated by “nights”—times when the fire was allowed to burn low. “Dusk” was
when all the high beings moved off the edge of the world and fell silent. In the hours afterwards
the light would slowly dim until we couldn’t even see ourselves anymore.
We had no way to count our days, though, no system of numbers and no way to record anything
permanently. We could only rely on our memories, and most of the time nothing happened worth
remembering.
The great exceptions were deaths. An angel would appear, shrink, and slide up next to one of us.
The rest of us would hear clanking and rattling and the angel would merge with the low being,
and then the two of them, joined, would begin to move. Sometimes this new conjoined beast
would scream in the voice of the dying man, sometimes it would be silent, expanding like an an-
gel until it blurred into nothing.
The ghosts of dead friends sometimes returned to us at night and spoke from the place of the
higher beings, but the things they said were incomprehensible to the point of madness.
Now, we low beings all agreed that there were patterns to the higher beings’ habits. On a morn-
ing when my mother appeared, for example, half the other lower beings’ mothers would too, and
those mothers (or the one mother of all of us) could be expected to send a good angel to merge
with each of us in turn, a warm and comforting sensation. (In fact this was a stout, middle-aged
woman employed to hug us.)
Some, though, went further. They said that the higher beings and angels did nothing without rea-
son, and if we worked at it, we could understand their patterns to the point of predicting our own
deaths. They spent their days inventing and testing new predictive rules. (The owl statue meant
someone would die—unless it was the snake statue that often followed the owl, or the owl twice
in a row. The next to die would be the low being whose mother appeared first after the owl. No,
the next would be the third from the left if the owl was followed by any triangle shape moving left
to right.) They admitted that these rules weren’t fully accurate yet, but their central dogma was
that overall they were getting better.
The rest of us, usually including me, didn’t buy it. They argued all the time, and rarely could one
Predictor convince most of the others that his prognostication was the one dictated by the current
version of their rules. The problem was, they were constantly forgetting those rules, or at least re-
membering them differently. They couldn’t write them down, after all. Worse, even when they did
remember their rules consistently they couldn’t keep track of which ones worked and which ones
didn’t, which ones they were supposed to throw out and which ones they’d decided to keep.
Unfortunately, we non-Predictors couldn’t articulate that objection, since we’d never thought of
permanently recording or tracking anything either, so we had to trust our gut suspicions that they
weren’t improving, really no better than their groundless faith that they were.
It was generally agreed that only Predictions supported by at least half of the believers counted on
the imaginary rules scorecard. When that many of them did manage to reach agreement and they
turned out to be wrong, we non-Predictors jeered. Even when they got one or two right, which
happened pretty often, we laughed it off as dumb luck. There were days, though, when they got
everything right, forecasting perfectly that the next shadow to pass would be my mother, the sail-
boat, the flower. Looking back on it, I can only assume that on such days the shadow puppeteers
on the wall were following what the Predictors said, although I still can’t imagine why. Maybe
they were ordered to do it every now and then. Maybe it amused them to see us non-Predictors
silenced, or even sometimes converted.
One day when they’d been playing that game for hours and we non-Predictors had long since
been cowed mute, Thrasymachus, one of the Predictors, called a stop.
“Someone’s going to die soon,” he said. “Snake, snake, star, bull.”
Some Predictor or other announced a death was coming nearly every day, and usually it didn’t
mean any more than the rest of their blather. But most of a day’s worth of correct guesses, unbro-
ken by errors, had made a difference. Some of the other Predictors started to murmur agreement
and even their voices were graver than normal. They weren’t used to being right either, and when
it came to a death Prediction, the prospect of being right was scary.
“No, it’s okay,” said Adeimantus, another Predictor, trying to dispel that fear. “It’s missing one. It
should be ‘snake, snake, star, bull, star.’”
Just as he finished, though, a star shadow floated across the wall and everyone shut up.
*************************************
It’s not that nothing like this had ever happened before, but it was more extreme than usual, and it
rattled me. Half the people I knew were utterly convinced that one of us was about to die, and the
other half were at least worried. What if they were right? I could be the one to go as well as any-
one else, and I didn’t want to die. Day-to-day life suddenly felt unbearably precious, the parades
and discussions of the higher beings too important and beautiful to ignore even for a moment.
It was in this heightened state of attention that I first saw a new higher being, a woman
statue with roughly the same dumpy triangular shape as my mother, and fell in love.
I don’t know precisely how old I was then—I don’t know how old I am now—but my
guess is that I’d reached my early twenties. Old enough that I’d been having wet dreams
for many years, anyway. (I probably rubbed myself in my sleep, but I never guessed because I
didn’t recognize that I had a penis. My face-on silhouette never revealed it.) Usually these dreams
had little specific imagery, only the feeling of floating somewhere warm and amniotic, maybe
rocked in the embrace of the angel who used to come and merge with me, and pleasure.
When I saw the new higher being, for the first time ever I experienced a similar stirring while
awake. I had no idea of sexual desire or even an image of distinct sexes, so when I say a “woman”
or call the shadow “she,” I am only being conventional. All I knew was that I became excited
when I saw her and she even began to appear in my wet dreams.
The sudden infatuation affected me deeply. It became one of my strongest fears when I thought
about my death, that I would stop seeing her before I could have her. I didn’t think of “having
her” in a clear, physical sense, of course, but I did have the sense of wanting something to happen
whenever I saw her. She floated at the top of the world, her depth and intensity pulsing with the
flickering light, and I desired her.
*************************************
Nothing happened, of course. Nothing could have happened. And
At first, when any of them is lib- I did turn out to be the next to die.
erated and compelled suddenly
to stand up and turn his neck An angel came to me and unfastened the clamps on my head and
round and walk and look towards the chains on my legs. He put his hands under my armpits and
the light, he will suffer sharp
pains; the glare will distress him,
lifted me to my feet. For the first time ever, my head lost the sup-
and he will be unable to see the port of the post behind it, and it tried to loll back and to one side.
realities of which in his former My neck had stiffened from its years of immobility, though, and
state he had seen the shadows.
gave very little. My head’s fifteen pounds of dead weight dragged
at its shortened tendons and petrified muscles, and they shrieked at the unexpected, fiery pain.
The angel carried me me away from the projection wall and toward the firelight. My eyes burned.
I called out for my mother to help me, but of course she couldn’t. I was being carried to my death,
helpless, and there was no one in my world to save me. Soon the force that held me would kill
me.
And then conceive someone
“You don’t have a mother here to help you,” said the angel. “This saying to him that what he saw
is what you called your mother, and the Venus they brought out to before was an illusion, but that
now, when he is approaching
tempt you, she’s right next to her.”
nearer to being and his eye is
I couldn’t see them. There were wild, inexplicable beings on turned towards more real exis-
tence, he has a clearer vision—
surfaces in all directions, but not them. Then the angel turned me what will be his reply? And you
away from the light and I finally did catch sight of them far away, may further imagine that his in-
structor is pointing to the objects
but for the first time I could not see myself below them. I had as they pass and requiring him
been erased from the world. to name them—will he not be
perplexed? Will he not fancy that
the shadows which he formerly
saw are truer than the objects
which are now shown to him?
In the morning I sat outside Glaucon’s door until he emerged and pleaded with him again to show
me the cave. I was there that night to plead once more. In between I walked to the meadow and
looked at the sky. This continued for four days, until finally he surrendered.
“After dark,” he said, “and I’m coming to keep an eye on you.”
*************************************
It wasn’t very far from town, barely a twenty-minute hike. We arrived in early evening and hid
in a stand of trees overlooking the cave entrance, a shack built directly into the hillside with two
guards stationed by its door. A path led to a few shanties a little way down the same hillside and
thence to town; we’d come up that same path initially but abandoned it a mile back and bush-
whacked through the woods to avoid detection.
Shortly after sunset the workers began to emerge in twos and threes. Half went into the shanties,
half continued down the path, passing fairly close by our hiding place. They were of all ages and
both sexes, and none gave any outward hint of his or her job. I wasn’t worried about being seen
ourselves, not in the deep shadow of the trees at dusk. And if they had seen us, I’d brought the
knife, tied to my belt with a slipknot.
About a dozen emerged in all. We waited awhile after the last of them to make sure no more were
coming, and then retreated into the forest, circling the mountain. “There,” Glaucon said after a
few hundred yards, pointing upslope to a darker spot in the grass and shrubs from which smoke
rose in a steady column.
The twilight was fading, but when we got to the cave there was still enough to see that soot had
stained the rock ceiling black. We could also see that for some distance within the ceiling was
quite low, barely over our heads.
We ducked inside and the smoke, clinging to the roof, hit us full in the face; it stung my eyes and
doubled me over. I stumbled down a steep and dangerously uneven pitch, until the floor pulled
away from the roof and gave us some air.
When I turned around I could see the jagged purple oval of sky that was the cave mouth, but I
couldn’t make out any of our surroundings. I whispered for Glaucon and he whispered back until
we found each other in the dark, and we started sliding downwards on our rumps, cautiously. He
said that when he’d been here before, under a rising moon, he’d found the passage to the main
chamber on the left, so we scooted over to hug the left wall and rubbed along it until it wasn’t
there anymore.
This new passage was so low that we had to crawl. Again we had smoke all around us, like crawl-
ing down a pitch-black chimney. I couldn’t breathe, I was half sick, but I kept pressing forward
until one of the orange spots in my vision stopped floating and I heard dull echoes that were not
my own heartbeats but other men’s voices. I crawled faster and the floor dropped again, and the
orange spot widened into a bonfire. Its heat pressed into me, drying my eyes sharp and stinging
where a moment before they’d been watering and stinging with smoke.
We were in a vast chamber. The fire burned close to our end of it, the upper end. The chamber
deepened and broadened away from us until darkness consumed its sides and roof, but the floor
stayed visible to the bottom. A third of the way down was a low brick wall with puppets, cutout
figures on sticks, and statues piled at its base. Our two shadows rose well beyond it, out where the
roof of the cavern fell toward the floor. They towered fifty feet along that curve of wall and ceil-
ing, our edges blurred and our heads and feet cut off.
We descended away from the fire and our shadows began to contract. The clotted murmurs I’d
heard from the entry passage separated into the individual voices of my old friends. As always,
they were arguing over the day’s events and the Predictions those events supported. At first I hur-
ried, excited to see them. But I pulled up short at the brick wall.
From that distance, I couldn’t tell them apart. I couldn’t see their faces, only their backs chained
to their posts, and their voices, echoing off the far wall, floated as free as ever they had in my days
as a shadow. This felt like home. If I went closer the echoes would recede and I’d quickly work
out which voice matched which body. That’d be no good anymore, it would be like Meno’s house
rather than my memories from here.
“I’m back,” I called. “I missed you all. ”
They hushed. The only sound was the crackle of the great fire. When I’d lived here those pops had
passed unnoticed, soft background static, but now they seemed very loud indeed.
“Are you a Higher One now?” asked Adeimantus at last.
Imagine once more, such a one “No, there are no higher beings and no angels,” I said. “I can go
coming suddenly out of the sun
to be replaced in his old situation where I want and I’ve seen more than you can imagine, but I’m
would he not be certain to have still the same as you.”
his eyes full of darkness?
And if there were a contest, and “That’s a lie,” shouted Thrasymachus. “Ghosts are blind. They
he had to compete in measuring can’t see anything.”
the shadows with the prison-
ers who had never moved out of “I can see much more than you,” I said.
the den, while his sight was still
weak, and before his eyes had “Then how many fingers am I holding up?”
become steady, would he not be
ridiculous? Men would say of him I tried, but couldn’t find any fingers held up by any shadows. The
that up he went and down he shadow bodies wavered, barely human, tar melted to quivering
came without his eyes; and that
it was better not even to think of mounds by the hot orange light.
ascending; and if anyone tried to
loose another and lead him up to
“I could free you all,” I said. “You could come with me.”
the light, let them only catch the
“He’s going to kill us!” Thrasymachus cried. “Help!”
offender, and they would put him
to death. And the others joined in, my old friends, begging good angels to
come and save them from me.
Glaucon tapped me on the elbow and pointed to the upper part of the chamber. A light pierced in
from the side up there, closer to us than the fire pit and opposite the passage we’d entered. We
shrank away from the wall and away from that new light, hunting for shadows to hide us.
As we retreated I saw the cutouts I’d loved as my parents lying on the ground, and then the statue
I’d lusted for. And I still felt a pang of desire for that statue and the warmth of familial love for
my mother and father, even though I could see plainly that they were lies, all three. They had
marked me too deeply and primally to forget. I would never find those feelings again in the world
above; even if I could find quiet, I would never have romance and family. I wanted those illusions
so much more than I wanted peace, but peace was the most I could have.
Glaucon was drawing me down toward our old fellows. They cast the only deep shadows in the
bottom half of the chamber, the only place for us to hide.
But I didn’t want to hide, certainly not by cringing down there among my abused friends. I broke
away from Glaucon and instead marched upslope, not in the throes of rage but grimly. A figure
appeared in the shaft of light. Maybe a guard, maybe the first of many guards, or maybe one of
the masters themselves, the ones who’d trapped us all so long in a world of pointless suffering. I
loosed the knife from my belt and prepared to fight.