The Cave

Our lives are filled with assumptions that most of take as true. We see these things with our eyes, hear them with our ears; sometimes, we touch, taste, or smell them. I am holding this big, heavy, dull grey rock in my two hands, and if don’t set it down right now, I’ll drop it on my foot! An experience like that would be undeniably real to 99 percent of us, but there then there are always some who would say otherwise. The Symbolists come to mind.

When we move on to things we see and hear but cannot touch because a screen of some sort intercedes between us and what we are watching, things get murky. Murkier, I would wager, than most of us realize.

Few could have accused me of being anything but mainstream when I was growing up. While I was never the most popular kid in school and always erred on the safe side of fashionable, I seldom made waves or asked questions. My evolution into a freethinker (whatever that might mean; I use that term rather than searching for something better) was a long, relatively slow process, although there were periods in which my intellectual growth advanced in great leaps. None were as large as the leap of this past year, which I’ve mentioned plenty of times, but I continue to work at learning new things, at keeping my eyes and my mind open, and at assessing for accuracy what gets served to me over the airwaves, so to speak. Most of the time, it feels like a strange, in-between reality that I navigate with a few others, and I am most grateful for them.

Charles Scribner III defined chiaroscuro as “the shadows that enrich the light,” and it’s a nice way of thinking about the make-believe world inhabited by most people. In fact, it plays well with Plato’s Cave.