“What was Plato’s myth of the cave?” I said. “Not really a myth, more a metaphor,” said Marcus. “The people who live in the cave and have never been outside see shadows on the walls cast by the sun. Animals and stuff. Because they’ve never been outside they think the shadows are the real thing rather than just, you know, shadows. Plato thought life was like that. That all we saw were shadows, but that the real things—the ideal forms of them—existed somewhere else.”
