The Cave

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?

And suppose once more, that he

is reluctantly dragged up a steep
and rugged ascent, and held fast
until he’s forced into the pres- *************************************
ence of the sun itself, is he not
likely to be pained and irritated? After that comes a gap in my memory. My mind couldn’t make
When he approaches the light
his eyes will be dazzled, and he enough sense of what I saw and experienced to order it. The clos-
will not be able to see anything est comparison I can offer that an ordinary person might under-
at all of what are now called
stand would be to one’s first moments of awareness after being
realities.
knocked down a flight of stairs, or upon waking from an alcoholic
He will require to grow accus-
tomed to the sight of the upper blackout in a strange house. I can remember the desperate, grasp-
world. And first he will see the ing confusion I felt as I tried to orient myself, but little else. Just a
shadows best, next the reflec-
tions of men and other objects in lot of sharp pains and chaos.
the water, and then the objects
themselves.
The first day that I do remember, I was sitting on the ground
with my back against something solid. Everything I could see
grew away from me at a sharp
angle, and I no longer seemed to have a body. I was sitting with
my back against a tree, I later learned, but at the time all I could
see of myself were my arms, when I held them out, on either side
of a hair-topped column, and even then they appeared at the wrong
angle. They gradually drew nearer and nearer and then at last disappeared along with the remain-
der of the column, and a little later new things took their place on the world, some traveling here
and there, others staying put. Later some of these stationary beings seemed to be growing, and
then they drew very close and an overwhelming light seared my eyes. Even when I shut them they
glowed red, the one color I recognized from the cave walls but now achingly intense. My angel
had propped me with my face given directly to the setting sun.
Finally the growing shadows touched me with their cold limbs, and all that was around me dark-
ened into nothingness. It turned cold. Hours passed before I stopped being terrified. I was not
dead, I thought, but I could yet die.
*************************************
By morning I was very hungry and thirsty. My whole life I had waited patiently and been hand-
fed when my turn came, but that was not working. I waved my arms, which had reappeared
with the light, and called out, but no feeding angel came. Maybe there were none in this place, I
thought. Maybe there was no food.
At last someone did come. He did not have to shrink like an angel to interact with me, but he was
able to move about like one. He came and stood near the hairy-topped column and told me to look
at my hands. I waved them as before.
“No, leave your hand here.” He pointed with his shadow-hand to an area just to the left of the
column.
I did.
“Now look here.” He put the tip of his finger beside a glistening circle in
the world’s surface.
I looked. Inside the circle was a thing with the same articulation and shape
as my hand, wavering and shooting off sparks of light.
“Wag your finger,” he said, “but keep watching this here.”
I wagged my finger, and the glistening thing wagged too. By directing me to move the shadow of
my hand—my actual hand, so far as I knew—Glaucon had gotten me to position my bodily hand
directly over a bowl of water, and for the first time I was seeing my reflection.
The column had shortened since dawn. The arms or hairs at the top swung gently back and forth.
Inside the circle, the reflection of leaves oscillated in time with them.
After that he fed me.
*************************************
Before I could feed myself—or do anything at all—I had to learn to see and inhabit my actual
body rather than my shadow. For that, in turn, I had to learn to see with both eyes. From my first
glimpse of the real world I’d been instinctively closing one to flatten what I saw into the two di-
mensions I knew. Glaucon couldn’t make me understand that I needed to open both, since I didn’t
yet know I had eyes; he had to place his fingertips on my eyelids and stroke them apart until the
muscles around the socket took the hint and relaxed.
The perception of depth made me nauseated at first, and it took several days before I could toler-
ate the sight of a thing moving at a distance from its background rather than through it. Only then
could I see my bodily hand passing over the bowl of water beneath, separated by several feet
from both its reflection and its shadow. Several more days passed before I understood that I lived
in that hand, and arm, and chest, and all of the body I was discovering as my neck developed
strength and flexibility. During those interim days I felt as if I had two arms on each side, moving
in unison.
Of course I came to rest in my physical body and not my shadow body, but even today I remem-
ber this as a transition from one state to another, not an awakening to a true state. Rationally I
know I’ve always been as I am now, but I have years of memories as a shadow, and those memo-
ries can’t be erased. My memory tells me that for much of my life I was a shadow, and then I died
and became a three-dimensional, solid person.
Finally now I could learn to walk, feed myself, use a proper toilet, bathe. It was exhausting, repet-
itive, and frustrating. Glaucon helped me through all of it and I never thanked him or even won-
dered why he would devote himself to me. I hadn’t yet started to ask why anyone did anything. To
the extent I thought about it I still imagined him as an angel, governed by rules I couldn’t know—
but mostly I didn’t think about it.
Instead I thought about the shadows I loved—my mother and father—and the one I had desired.
In my dreams I often found myself back in the cave, and sometimes one or the other would arrive
to share the wall with me. More often I dreamt about searching for them fruitlessly, drowning in
loneliness.
When I was awake I looked for shadows like theirs in the hope of finding them attached to a new
body like mine, appropriate to this afterlife. I didn’t find them.
*************************************
At the same time, though, this was a period of wonderful physical discoveries. For once, for ex-
ample, my food tasted good to me. Glaucon brought me mainly basic things—yogurt mixed with
honey at first, the inside of fresh bread as I learned to chew—but to me they were feasts beyond
imagination. The first time I bit into an apple, I did not know how to bite and merely sank my
teeth into the skin and left them there, sugar water oozing. Glaucon showed me how to bring my
teeth together with force and then work them to grind the hard tart flesh, juice messy on my lips
and fingers.
 Once I got past the fear and stiffness I loved walking too, and not just because for once I could
see the same scene from different vantages. I also loved the feeling of my calf muscles contract-
ing to push me forward, while the thigh muscle of the other leg contracted to pull me. I loved
when I got better at it and could direct the many muscles of both legs to swing me forward with-
out focused attention—when my brand-new (if somewhat neglected) body seemed to move all
on its own, by a magic that I controlled. I loved when my limbs grew tired and the joy of resting
them when they hurt.
And then there was shitting. It had been a mild pleasure in the cave, yes, but in the first month I
lived in my body it became a daily existential revelation. I’d always known the feeling of the need
to shit, but it had been merely information; now I understood that the pressure I felt came from in-
side me. A thing within my body yet not my self. When I sat to release it I concentrated, listening
with all my nerves for the secret workings of my body that I could feel and control but still not
see. I could feel the shit dragged along the walls of my colon and the relief of it being gone. But it
itself, when I could see it and smell it, that was insensate. It was glorious and mysterious.
*************************************
Eventually I did take note of the sky, the stars, and the sun. I
Then he will gaze upon the light
asked Glaucon why shadows in this life kept changing shape and
of the moon and the stars and direction, and he explained that they depended on the angle of the
the spangled heaven; and he sun. He went on to explain how the sun stayed in place while the
will see the sky and the stars by
night better than the sun or the earth flew in a circle and revolved.
light of the sun by day.
I didn’t understand what he meant by “seasons.” I’d only spent
Last of all he will be able to see
the sun, and not mere reflections most of the one summer outside the cave so far.
of it in the water, but he will see
it in its own proper place, and
*************************************
not in another; and he will con-
That summer ended. It grew colder at night and Glaucon said
template it as it is.
we had to move to town. I accepted this as I had everything else,
He will then proceed to argue
that this is what gives the sea- though it surprised me to learn that this new world stretched
son and the years, and is the beyond our one meadow. Every few days for weeks I’d watched
guardian of all that is in the vis-
ible world, and in a certain way Glaucon walk up the dirt road until he passed the crest and sunk
the cause of all things which he from view, and then later seen him return with supplies, but I
and his fellows have been accus-
hadn’t known I was capable of the same myself.
tomed to behold.
After an interminable hike, during which I had to stop seven or
eight times to rest, we came to the town. I could dwell on all the new things there—the houses,
the animals, the noise, the bustle, the smells—but in truth I was so swamped I didn’t take them
in individually. The first big new thing I learned really didn’t come until the following morning,
after my first night ever in a bed (the deepest physical release I’d ever felt): I woke up, legs stiff
from all the walking the day before, and Glaucon told me that I could do anything I liked. I didn’t
 understand what he was talking about. He had to spend considerable time explaining that he
would no longer tell me what to do from hour to hour, and neither would anyone else. There was
plenty I wasn’t allowed to do by law, but nothing I must do.
Panic. I had no idea what I might want to do. I was only still learning what I was capable of.
“Maybe you’d like to go exploring,” Glaucon suggested. “Go for a stroll.”
So that’s what I did, all that day and every day for at least a week. I walked around by myself,
exploring. I had a hundred small revelations a day—about the existence of money, for example, or
that all these people milling around on the same plane were separated by subtle differences just as
powerful in their way as my old distinction between high and low beings—but I’ll skip over most
of these, since they’d soon grow repetitious.
Two of them are worth mentioning, though. I began to perceive them during that first week, but it
took months before I understood their implications.
First, I came to appreciate the great freedom that people had, compared to my former life. They
could do an enormous variety of things, simple and complex. Second, and conversely, very little
happened without someone’s intention. Of course life included pure accidents along with the
half-accidents that occurred when many people’s efforts collided. But one couldn’t even have the
idea of “accident” without the idea of intention to oppose it. And since people could do just about
anything, most of the time their actions must be the result of a decision to do one thing instead of
another.
In the cave we’d had neither intentions nor accidents. We believed in causes and patterns, but
those were theories about how the world worked as a whole, not about the choices of individual
beings. When I saw my mother stop and reverse direction, for example, I didn’t ask why she’d
decided to do that, because I couldn’t imagine that she had a choice. When the Predictors foresaw
someone’s death it wasn’t because they thought they’d guessed the angels’ motivations, any more
than a doctor believes he understands the psychology of a tumor. Every event was fated; every-
thing that happened had to happen.
Now, though, I saw that an operation as complex and enduring as the cave must have a purpose
behind it, and I demanded to know it. Why had we been locked in darkness? Why make me love
and lust for shadows? After a month in the real world Glaucon took me to a brothel and I
found that I could only get aroused in complete darkness. It repulsed me to see a fleshly
woman touching what I’d been forced to accept as my body, but in the dark I could accept
that touch while fantasizing.
I never wished to be back in the cave, locked up again and de-
When he remembered his old
luded. It was better to know the truth. I did often wish, though,
habitation, and the wisdom of
the den and his fellow prison- that my old delusions were the truth, that I could have really been
ers, do you not suppose that he
would felicitate himself on the
change, and pity them?
a shadow, weightless, gliding, and changeable. And if they were in the habit
of conferring honors among
So who had made me like this? Who paid performers to carry stat- themselves on those who were
ues and cutout shapes? Who paid the woman who hugged me as quickest to observe the passing
shadows and to remark which
a child, or the man who carried away my bucket of shit? I asked of them went before, and which
Glaucon and he said he didn’t know. He’d once been like me, he followed after, and which were
together; and who therefore best
said, chained in the dark and then painfully dragged forth. The
able to draw conclusions as to
man who’d pulled him free had later shown him how to find the the future, do you think that he
cave, and he’d gone in and rescued me. He’d been afraid of being would care for such honors and
glories or envy the possessors
caught and returned to his post and chains so he’d gone in after of them? Would he not say with
nightfall, when the performers and other workers were off duty, Homer, better to be the poor
servant of a poor master, and
freed me, and carried me away. He didn’t know any more than me to endure anything, rather than
about the workings of the cave itself. think as they do and live after
their manner?
I asked if I’d known him back in the cave and he said yes, he’d
changed his name to hide. He used to be called Polemarchus. And
in fact his voice was very much like my old friend Polemarchus’s, without the distorting echo.
*************************************
Soon afterward he took me to a gathering of other cave escapees and it was the same thing: I
recognized their voices more or less, though they introduced themselves with unfamiliar names.
There were five in all, scattered around the main room of a small house much like Glaucon’s,
drinking tea. Glaucon huddled with Crito and Meno, whose house it was. Ion and Parmenides sat
by themselves and said nothing, and the one named Socrates cornered and talked at me.
“Would you not say that our passage out of the cave, from ignorance to knowledge of our true
selves, might yet be mirrored by a more profound ignorance today, to be followed by yet a higher
knowledge?”
He’d plopped down next to me on the couch I’d chosen and was already leaning in closer than I
liked. “I suppose,” I said, recoiling a little.
“But would you not agree that when we lived in the cave, we had no understanding of how lim-
ited we were? If we had tried to reason our way to comprehension of the higher world based on
what we knew then, could we have even come close?”
His breath reeked of garlic and wine. “I guess not.”
“What do you think, then, of those philosophers who would like us now, bound as we are to this
world, to guess after higher truths? If such truths exist, would they not necessarily be hidden from
us? Would not the shadows those truths cast into our current world be as misleading and unhelpful
as the shadows we saw in our cave?”
“Um,” I said.
He gripped my forearm. “Must we not, therefore, reject those philosophers and denounce their
utopian dreams? Is not the only wise man the one who admits profoundly that he knows noth-
ing, not the one who admits to mankind’s general ignorance yet still insists that he can deduce the
True and the Good?”
“I’m going to get some more tea,” I said, and escaped to hide behind Glaucon.
“I’m going to ask him,” said Crito as I approached. “Have you thought about getting a job?”
That was directed at me. I shook my head and Crito gave Glaucon an accusing glare.
“Leave him alone,” Glaucon said. “I’ve gone back to work. I’m not using the fund anymore.”
“But you’re not paying into it either,” said Crito. He turned to me again. “It cost money to get you
out and feed the two of you the whole summer. It costs every time. So when I ask if you’ve got a
job it’s not about you, it’s about when we can go for the next guy.”
I looked to Glaucon. I had some familiarity with money, since I had after all been in surface soci-
ety for over a month now, and at least an idea of work. But I didn’t really understand what Crito
was asking of me, and I had no idea, certainly, how to go about satisfying him.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Glaucon said, more to Crito than me.
Crito might have wanted to push the argument further but Ion had started beckoning to us. Par-
menides stood from the couch the two of them had been sharing, fetched an oil lamp from a
nearby shelf, set it on the low table in front of Ion, and lit it.
“Close the drapes,” Ion said when we came near. Crito and Glaucon lifted one of the other couch-
es and set it beside Ion’s. When it was in place Meno arranged heavy cloth over the room’s two
windows. We fell into a half darkness, the light rising from the lamp staining the faces of the oth-
ers with shadow.
Ion stood too now, and he and Parmenides went to collect some objects from a sack lying at the
foot of the wall. The rest arranged themselves on the two couches facing the lamp and I followed
their lead.
“We’re going to tell the story of Timaeus, the one performer in the cave who ever felt enough pity
to set one of us free,” said Ion. “He freed Crito, Crito freed Laches and Meno, and so on for all of
us.”
“But,” said Parmenides, “we’re going to tell it as a story of the cave.” He lifted something and a
shadow appeared on the wall: “Timaeus was puppeteer for the cutout we knew as ‘mother.’”
With that, I was no longer in Meno’s small house, watching the beginning of a shadow play, but
back in chains, in the cave, with my mother and father. Far away I saw us lower beings, though I
couldn’t hear our voices. My mother was making a choice, it seemed. My mother was coming as
an angel to kill me. I was dying all over again. I screamed for help again and no one came, and
the angel took hold of me.
It was bright now. My mother and father were gone. But I was still dying, the angel still held me.
I was back in Meno’s house and Glaucon had hold of me, about to kill me again. The light poured
in the windows. I kept screaming and screaming for help, but none of them helped me. I remem-
bered I had arms and legs now to protect myself, and struck at them, forced my way free, ran out
of the house.
*************************************
Eventually I calmed down and made my way home to Glaucon’s. By then it was dusk, and we ate
dinner together quietly. The only conversation we had came when I asked who Laches was and
why he hadn’t been there.
Glaucon sighed. “Sometimes, Crito says, the men we rescue turn out well, like Meno or me, ready
to go save more. Sometimes they stay a little twisted, like Socrates or Ion. A couple of them have
simply run away. From what I’ve heard, Laches had the hardest time. He was always angry, and
in the end he got himself killed fighting with guards at the cave. He was trying to free all of us at
once, or slit our throats maybe. Crito doesn’t know.”
I thought about that a fair bit that night as I failed to sleep. Although my panic had subsided, I too
had begun to feel angry. On the street after I ran out of Meno’s house, I’d seen a family—mother,
father, and three-year-old son—and thought of my own parents, and for a few seconds I’d hated
that boy more than I’d ever hated anyone. Lying in bed I still resented him, in fact, for having
normal parents with him, loving him, and resented the parents and everyone else for never doing
anything to stop the horror of the cave or rescue me from it. All night I itched with that anger, and
when I did manage to doze, I had nightmares of being dragged off to death.
*************************************
Maybe I’d needed to reach a certain stability before I could fall out of balance again. In my
earliest days out of the cave I’d been overwhelmed by quotidian life. It had taken all my active
concentration to learn to eat, walk, and shit. Now, though, I couldn’t seem to manage any con-
centration at all. Over the next weeks I wandered around, mostly uninterested in where my legs
might carry me, except that I was constantly jittery, on guard. My mind roiled but none of what it
threw up to its surface connected to anything else, it was all old Prediction methods, and pieces of
songs, and “that scrap of shadow looks familiar,” and “I must have had a real mother.”
What I was on guard against were images that could drop me back into abject terror: the wrong
scrap of shadow. My own shadow. A large shadow shrinking anywhere near me. Sometimes I
would catch sight of such things and be right back in the cave, always in that moment when Glau-
con killed me, calling helplessly for my fake mother to save me.
I started to stay inside in the early morning and late afternoons, when shadows were longest.
And then I stayed inside even more because there, sometimes, I could still have moments when
my mind quieted—­when inside myself I saw no images of the cave, when I didn’t hate anyone
and wasn’t afraid, and the muscles in my jaw and between my eyes relaxed. Almost always these
respites came when I was inside Glaucon’s house, sitting and staring at his tan-painted wall.
So I stayed in during the days and went out, when I went out at all, in the middle of the night,
when the streets were empty. And this clearly made Glaucon concerned. When he came home
from his job as some kind of gardener or laborer or something he’d ask what I’d done all day. If
I said, “Nothing,” he’d look very sad. Finally he suggested, first gently and then more insistently,
that maybe it was time for me to look for work of my own.
“It can’t be helping for you to stay in here all day, brooding,” he said. “At least if you had a job
you’d keep your mind busy.”
Then one day I exploded and smashed every lamp in the house. The shadows they cast were too
eerily still. When Glaucon came home he told me I’d have to leave. He would still help me if he
could, but I couldn’t live with him anymore.
I didn’t blame him. In fact, I suspected he’d only waited to kick me out because it had been cold.
Now it was spring, I could sleep outside without freezing.
*************************************
I set out wandering aimlessly, and as I kept changing course to avoid other people, I soon found
myself heading out of town. I decided to go back to the one other place I knew in this world: the
meadow where Glaucon had educated me. It was a short walk.
It comforted me to be there.
I was able to relax for the
first time in months—really
relax, for more than just a
few minutes. I lay in the
deep grass and stared up at
the meaningless shapes of
clouds drifting across the
sky, the way my parents had
once floated atop my world.
Back then I’d believed with
my brothers that they and
the angels controlled all that
happened. But it turned out
it was only luck that my
Glaucon’s rescue came so soon after that ominous death Prediction. Glaucon had been no more
aware of that than we’d been aware of him.
Perhaps, as Socrates had suggested, there was a truer world than this one, the way this one was
truer than the cave. If so there must be unseen gods moving those clouds the way the performers
had moved my parents around. And those gods must be monstrous sadists, or at least indifferent
to suffering, just as the men who’d put me in the cave could be only sadistic or callous. Or else
there were no gods, just as there hadn’t really been angels or higher beings, only more low, lim-
ited people like me.
Eventually I fell asleep.
I woke a few hours before dawn, under a half moon. I used its light to find my old tree trunk, and
sat against it the same way I had when I’d first emerged, until the sun rose and I saw that familiar
landscape of shadows. And just like that first morning I’d seen the real sun, I discovered I was
growlingly hungry. I hadn’t eaten since Glaucon kicked me out.
I hiked back to town. I intended to beg for breakfast, but as I walked my ire started to burn again.
I wasn’t yet hungry enough to beg from people I hated. I went straight to Glaucon’s house in-
stead; he’d left already for work, so I let myself in and ate from his pantry. Then I stayed inside
until he came back home. He wasn’t pleased to see me.
“I didn’t mean only the one night,” he said. “You really can’t stay here.” Rock dust streaked his
face.
“Laches was right,” I said. “How can we only rescue one at a time and leave the rest behind?”
Glaucon shook his head. “We’ve whittled it down from 40 men to under 30, and there are no new
ones. We will get them all, in time.”
“Years!” I couldn’t wait for anything that long. I couldn’t possibly hold onto my sanity. I didn’t
have a strong grip on it now.
“But it’ll get done in the end. Your way nothing will get done. Will you be the one to care for all
those extra men? You can’t even take of yourself yet.”
“You have to show me where it is.” I wanted to go even though Glaucon was obviously right:
I wasn’t ready to help anyone, let alone all of them. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but that
didn’t seem important. I had to go right away. My path to a deep, lasting peace ran through there.
“No,” Glaucon said. “Now go away.”
*************************************
I spent the next few nights in the street. Instead of begging I stole. I’d taken a knife from Glau-
con’s kitchen and late at night followed a very fat, middle-aged man reeling home drunk from a
friend’s house. He stopped after a few blocks to piss on the outer wall of a fine, large compound
and I sidled up behind him and held the knife beside his face where he could see it. He dropped
his tunic front in shock and I heard the splash of urine on stone cut off abruptly. Then I had a
moment of shock myself as I felt it puddling warm around my bare left foot. I said, “Oh!” and
stepped back involuntarily, and he took off running.
He was spurred by fear but badly out of shape, and all the wine he’d had kept tripping him. I
should have caught him easily, except I still couldn’t run well either, at least not for long. He’d
run a few steps and look back and see me walking as fast as I could to keep up, and then, winded,
try to drop to a walk also and instead lose his balance and pitch forward. The first time he fell I
tried to run to close the gap while he struggled back to his feet, but I ran out of breath even faster
than him.
I don’t know why he didn’t cry for help. Maybe he couldn’t manage it. For five full minutes there
were only the whispers of our feet in the dust as I closed on him inch by inch. Finally he stumbled
and didn’t try to get up again, just lay in the road on his vast stomach, wheezing. I reached him
and he rolled onto his back and pushed himself up to sit, so that he slumped forward with his fat
legs crabwise before him. He untied a little bag from his tunic belt and held it up to me. I took it.
He looked almost heartbroken and smelled of pee.
It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough to keep me fed.

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.