BitterSweetLife

A Story With Pictures

* Many of us remember the “shadows on the cave wall” illustration, even if we’ve forgotten who came up with it. (Matter of fact, it was Plato.) The philosopher likens us to ignorant people trapped in the depths of a cave and unaware of our captivity. Behind us, a distant fire casts shadowy images of the real world onto the cave wall, and these are all we have to go by. Only an escape from the cave, an arduous intellectual and spiritual struggle, will yield an awareness of life’s true nature, and ultimately a response to Goodness. The heart of the argument is that there are hidden truths lying under the surface of things—ultimate reality—which only a few will ever awake to, much less grasp.

As long as we linger in the cave, clutching what we think is comfort, we won't discover the vivid truth behind our dimly lit existence. Since the darkness of the cave is all-inclusive, we ourselves, as well as every aspect of the “outside” world, will appear alike…as shadows. Until we leave.

This analogy is fascinating, and has much to offer, especially to the modern mind, drowning in culture that tends to obscure, rather than illuminate, the real self. Recently, “Plato’s shadows” provided inspiring material for some photographic imagination.


Frame 1


As shadows, we tend to be a social people. In fact, you’ll never find one of us striking off alone. (If someone does, we disavow him as unshadowish.) In some places, we shadows are as thick as trees.

Frame 2


I’ve heard it said there's a world where shadows are too thin to go, and I believe it’s true. Isn’t that why we stay together? Once in a long while, a shadow does leave, and this is always painful. Who suffers more, the deserter, or those he leaves behind? Hard to say, but the community is compromised. The outcast has lost his shadow-hood and become something else. Things can never be as they were.

Frame 3


Boundaries exist for a reason, we say. We believe only in what we can see. Just the facts if you please, cold and dark. If we were meant to go looking for another world, we would all know how to get there. It wouldn’t be so elusive. The search wouldn’t be so painful. So why do I feel like something’s missing?

Frame 4


Here is a confession. I think we all secretly dream about leaving. Why is hard to say. But one keeps these feelings to oneself, and they gradually lessen. Still, I sometimes picture the place where a few of us have gone. Or I try. It’s hard to know what it might be like. I’ve walked around and looked, but haven’t found it yet. Perhaps I haven’t tried hard enough. But if I ever find it, I think I’ll know it when I do.

Frame 5


I hear that the next place is a world so great and so un-dim that everything is changed. No shadows there—a new way of perceiving. They say that from there, you can see back into our world. I wonder why we can’t see that world from here. They say the other place is filled with a thing called "light," and that the light will change you. No one I know has ever been there. Some days I think I will be the first.