The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [513]
The truth is that we can dream dreams, we can paint word-pictures, we can imagine stories - but they cannot tell us for certain how the story of mankind will end, let alone what form such a `rebirth' might take. As Robert Frost had it:
What stories can tell us, however, much more profoundly than we have realised, is how our human nature works, and why we think and behave in this world as we do. That is why I believe that to arrive at a proper understanding of why our species has the compulsion to imagine stories is as important a riddle as there is left for mankind to solve on this earth.
Even if it cannot save us from ourselves, it may help us to understand why Dante ended his great poem on that most extraordinary thought of all: his vision that, even when life is ended, we can still be absorbed back into that unimaginable power which ultimately holds all the universe together and which continues for ever: `the love that moves the sun and the other stars'.
`First people deny a thing; then they belittle it; then they say it was known all along.' Alexander von Humboldt
One of the most profound stories in the world is really no more than an elaborate image: Plato's Parable of the Cave.' He conjures up the picture of a row of men, imprisoned in a cave, their gaze forcibly fixed in only one direction. Here on the wall in front of them they see a constant play of shadows as figures and objects pass in front of a fire behind them; and, since this is all they ever see, they take it for the reality of the world in which they live.
One of them then finds himself free to look around and move from his place. He dimly sees above and behind them what appears to be a purer, stronger light than that of the flickering fire. He makes the rough and steep ascent up to its source, to discover that it is coming from the mouth of the cave. He steps out into the daylight, where he sees the sun. At first its light is so bright that he is blinded. But as he gradually becomes accustomed to it, he can for the first time gaze on the real world outside the cave and all that is in it.
Dazzled by what he has seen, he makes his way back down into the darkness to where his old companions are still transfixed, like a modern television audience, by the play of shadows on the wall. He tries to explain to them the wonder of what he has witnessed, but there is no way they can understand what he is talking about. The dancing shadows on the wall are the only reality they know. They laugh at him, imagine he is making up his story about what he has seen, and call him mad. He, on the other hand, can now see the shapes on the wall clearly for what they are, as no more than shadows and illusions. He can longer share his companions' commendation of each other for all their clever observations about the shadows, and what they represent, because he has glimpsed `reality.
The archetypal essence of this story is much the same as that symbolised in the Cheyenne story of Jumping Mouse. When Jumping Mouse returns to the dark forest and tries to tell his fellow mice about his journey to the great river, and how he had caught a far-off glimpse of the `Sacred Mountain, they cannot understand what he is talking about and scorn him.
The forest-dwelling mice, like Plato's cave-dwellers, represent collective egoconsciousness. They are naturally sure the world they see around them is real, because it is all their limited state of consciousness allows them to see. The hero of each of these stories has found that the walls of his consciousness have suddenly fallen away, allowing him to glimpse