I could move a bit. The padded iron hoop around my foreheadwas fastened to a wooden post resting loose in its posthole, so Icould stand up—to the length of my arm and leg chains—and sit back down again, the post rattling up and down with me. Most of the time I sat on a cushioned board, my legs drawn in. The boardlay across a bucket, and I could remove the board when I wantedto use the bucket. When I was done I would tell the higher beingsand an angel would come to empty the bucket. Angels fed metoo, 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 therewere directions one might look other than “forward.” To me, standing, removing the board, thesewere biologically necessary. I did not conceive of the bucket or the board as separate from myself. I did what I’d been told I had to do. In fact, I did not conceive of my “self” as located aroundand mostly below the apparatus that saw the world, as I do now; Ilocated myself in my shadow, cast on the wall ahead.I suppose that if I’d had many physical impressions to contendwith I might have had trouble maintaining a sane, stable ideaof myself at all, split between where I saw myself and where Ireceived sensations, but in fact there was very little to sense. Iwas fed the same thick, nourishing but tasteless mush at the sametimes every day, and shat it back out again on more or less a

regular schedule. As instructed, I stood for fteen minutes every

other hour, along with all my mates, I assume to militate against pressure sores on our buttocks and thighs.*************************************At the time, I divided the world into three classes of beings: low,high, and angelic. Low beings, like me, were toward the bottomof the projection wall. A low being always kept the same shape

Behold! human beings living ina underground den, which hasa mouth open towards the lightand reaching all along the den;here they have been from theirchildhood, and have their legsand necks chained so that theycannot move, and can only seebefore them, being prevented bythe chains from turning roundtheir heads.

The Cave

Above and behind them a re

is blazing at a distance, and

between the re and the prison

-ers there is a raised way; andyou will see, if you look, a lowwall built along the way, like thescreen which marionette play-ers have in front of them, overwhich they show the puppets.There are men passing along thewall carrying all sorts of vessels,

and statues and gures of ani

-mals made of wood and stoneand various materials, whichappear over the wall. Some of them are talking, others silent.The prisoners see only their ownshadows, or the shadows of one

another, which the re throws on

the opposite wall of the cave.And of the objects which are be-

and the same voice. He could move himself slightly, but he couldnot move anything else, and he always sat in the same place.There were about thirty of us.

High beings, those that oated at the top of the wall, were not so

restricted. My mother and father were high beings. She usuallyappeared as a ball atop a triangle, like this: He was usually a ball atop an arrow: But my mother could assume many shapes,and spoke with many voices. When I was young and didn’t seeher I would call out and she might answer from the shape of alion, or a square, and I would only know it was her because shesaid so. Many of the other low beings also had mothers wholooked 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 allchildren 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 tofeed 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 re 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 afterwardsthe 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 worthremembering.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 beastwould 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 thehigher 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, andthose mothers (or the one mother of all of us) could be expected to send a good angel to mergewith each of us in turn, a warm and comforting sensation. (In fact this was a stout, middle-aged

ing carried in like manner theyonly see the shadows.If they were able to conversewith one another, would they notsuppose that they were namingwhat was actually before them?And suppose further that theprison had an echo which camefrom the other side, would theynot be sure to fancy when oneof the passers-by spoke that thevoice which they heard camefrom the passing shadow?To them, the truth would beliterally nothing but the shadowsof images.

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 owndeaths. They spent their days inventing and testing new predictive rules. (The owl statue meantsomeone 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 rst after the owl. No,

the next would be the third from the left if the owl was followed by any triangle shape moving leftto right.) They admitted that these rules weren’t fully accurate yet, but their central dogma wasthat overall they were getting better.The rest of us, usually including me, didn’t buy it. They argued all the time, and rarely could onePredictor convince most of the others that his prognostication was the one dictated by the currentversion 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 didremember their rules consistently they couldn’t keep track of which ones worked and which onesdidn’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 theyweren’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 onthe imaginary rules scorecard. When that many of them did manage to reach agreement and theyturned out to be wrong, we non-Predictors jeered. Even when they got one or two right, whichhappened 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 ower. 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. Maybethey were ordered to do it every now and then. Maybe it amused them to see us non-Predictorssilenced, 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’tmean 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 agreementand even their voices were graver than normal. They weren’t used to being right either, and whenit came to a death Prediction, the prospect of being right was scary.