Man cave

Above: Dolmen de Menga panorama, Antequera, España

Eskişehir, Türkiye

Friday 23 August 2024

As more people move to our cities there is one problem that planners have to face up to:

Where are they going to put everyone?

Above: Porsuk Çayı (Badger Stream), Eskişehir (Old City), Türkiye (Turkey)

The lack of affordable accommodation is the single most pressing issue facing cities from London to San Francisco.

It is tough to see how even wealthy places such as these will cope.

Because, even if the problem is universal, there is no cookie-cutter solution.

Above: London, England, United Kingdom

We need clever thinking, new materials and a wise use of technology if we are going to create a new tier of both accessible and handsome housing.

It is not enough to simply throw up tall towers and lure us into ever-smaller apartments.

Our homes define us and shape our futures – and those of our families – so we need to build places that trigger a sense of community and a feeling that we are not alone in the vast metropolis.

The good news is that even if the problem may seem monumental, there are people determined to have a go.

Perhaps projects from the past offer lessons for the future?

Above: San Francisco, California, United States of America

A cave dweller, or troglodyte, is a human who inhabits a cave or the area beneath the overhanging rocks of a cliff.

Above: Triq I-Gherien, Mellieha, Malta

Some prehistoric humans were cave dwellers, but most were not.

Such early cave dwellers, and other prehistoric peoples, are also called cave men (the term also refers to the stereotypical “caveman” stock character type from fiction and popular culture).

Above: Cave dwellings, Spiti, India

Despite the name, only a small portion of humanity has ever dwelt in caves:

Caves are rare across most of the world.

Most caves are dark, cold and damp.

Other cave inhabitants, such as bears and cave bears, cave lions, and cave hyenas, often made caves inhospitable for people.

The Grotte du Vallonnet, a cave in the French Riviera, was used by people approximately one million years ago.

Although stone tools and the remains of eaten animals have been found in the cave, there is no indication that people dwelt in it.

Above: Grotte du Vallonnet, Roquebrun Cap Martin, Alpes Maritime, France

Since about 750,000 years ago, the Zhoukoudian cave system, in Beijing, China, has been inhabited by various species of human being, including Peking Man (Homo erectus pekinensis) and modern humans (Homo sapiens).

Above: Entrance to Zhoukoudian Peking Man Site, Fangshan District, Beijing, China

Above: Peking Man skull

Starting about 170,000 years ago, some Homo sapiens lived in some cave systems in what is now South Africa, such as Pinnacle Point and Diepkloof Rock Shelter.

The stable temperatures of caves provided a cool habitat in summers and a warm, dry shelter in the winter.

Above: Diepkloof Rock Shelter, Western Cape, South Africa

Remains of grass bedding have been found in nearby Border Cave.

Above: Border Cave, Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa

About 100,000 years ago, some Neanderthals dwelt in caves in Europe and western Asia.

Above: Neanderthal skeleton, American Museum of Natural History, Manhattan, New York, USA

Caves there also were inhabited by some Cro-Magnons, from about 35,000 years ago until about 8000 BC. 

Both species built shelters, including tents, at the mouths of caves and used the caves’ dark interiors for ceremonies.

The Cro-Magnon people also made representational paintings on cave walls.

Above: Cro-Magnon skull

Also about 100,000 years ago, some Homo sapiens worked in Blombos Cave, in what became South Africa.

They made the earliest paint workshop now known, but apparently did not dwell in the caves.

Above: Blombos Cave, Heidelberg, Western Cape, South Africa

Especially during war and other times of strife, small groups of people have lived temporarily in caves, where they have hidden or otherwise sought refuge.

They also have used caves for clandestine and other special purposes while living elsewhere.

Above: Cave dwellings, Amboise, Loire Valley, France

Writers of the classical Greek and Roman period made several allusions to cave-dwelling tribes in different parts of the world, such as the Troglodytae.

(The Troglodytae (“cave goers“), were people mentioned in various locations by many ancient Greek and Roman geographers and historians, including Herodotus, Agatharchides (2nd century BC), Diodorus Siculus, Strabo (64 BC – 24 CE), Pliny (1st century), Flavius Josephus, Tacitus (56 – 117), Claudius Aelianus (175 – 235) and Porphyry (234 – 305).

Herodotus referred to the Troglodytae in his Histories as being a people hunted by the Garamantes in Libya.

He said that the Troglodytae were the swiftest runners of all humans known and that they ate snakes, lizards and other reptiles.

He also stated that their language was unlike any known to him, and sounded like the screeching of bats. 

Above: Bust of Greek historian-geographer Herodotos (484 – 425 BC)

Alice Werner (1913) believed that this was a clear allusion to the early Khoisan, indigenous inhabitants of Southern Africa, because their languages contain distinctive click sounds.

(Khoisan is a catch-all term for the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa who traditionally speak non-Bantu languages.)

Above: German writer-teacher Alice Werner (1859 – 1935)

Above: A San (Bushman) tribesman, Namibia

According to Aristotle, a dwarfish race of Troglodytes dwelt on the upper course of the Nile, who possessed horses and were in his opinion the Pygmies of fable.

Above: Bust of Greek philosopher-polymath Aristotle (384 – 322 BC)

Above: A pygmy fights a crane, National Archaeological Museum of Spain, Madrid, España

In ancient writing, apparently the best known of the African cave-dwellers were the inhabitants of the “Troglodyte country” on the coast of the Red Sea, as far north as the Greek port of Berenice, of whom an account was preserved by Diodorus Siculus from Agatharchides of Cnidus, and by Artemidorus Ephesius in Strabo.

Above: Fresco depiction of Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC)

They were a pastoral people, living entirely on the flesh of their herds, or, in the season of fresh pasture, on mingled milk and blood.

Above: Papyrus of Greek geographer Artemidorus of Ephesus (1st century BC)

In his work Geographica, Strabo mentions a tribe of Troglodytae living along with the Crobyzi in Scythia Minor, near the Ister (Danube) and the Greek colonies of Callatis and Tomis. 

He also mentions tribes living in various parts of Africa from Libya to the Red Sea.

Above: Engraving of Greek geographer Strabo (64 BC – 24 CE)

In his work Chorographia, Pomponius Mela mentions that they own no resources, and rather than speak, they make a high-pitched sound.

They creep around deep in caves and are nurtured by serpents.

Above: Reconstruction of Greek geographer Pomponius Mela (1st century) world map

In his work Deipnosophists, Athenaeus of Naucratus (late 2nd century – early 3rd century) wrote that Pythagoras who wrote about the Red Sea mentioned that they make their pandura out of the white mangrove which grows in the sea and that Euphorion in his book on the Isthmian Games mentioned that they played sambucas (arched harp) with four strings like the Parthians.

Above: Seated sphinx plate from Naucratus, Egypt

Above: Bust of Greek philosopher Pythagoras (570 – 495 BC)

Above: Depiction of Greek poet Euphorion (3rd century BC), House of the Golden Bracelet, Pompeii, Italia

Above: A seven-stringed sambuca

In his work On the Characteristics of Animals, Claudius Aelianus mentions that the tribe of Troglodytae are famous and derive their name from their manner of living.

He also adds that they eat snakes. 

Furthermore, he wrote that Troglodytes believe that the King of the Beasts is the Ethiopian Bull, because it possesses the courage of a lion, the speed of a horse, the strength of a bull, and is stronger than iron.

Above: Depiction of Greek writer-teacher Claudius Aelianus (175 – 235)

Above: Depiction of an Ethiopian forest bull

Flavius Josephus alludes to a place he calls Troglodytis while discussing the account in Genesis, that after the death of Sarah, Abraham married Keturah and fathered six sons who in turn fathered many more.

“Now, for all these sons and grandsons, Abraham contrived to settle them in colonies; and they took possession of Troglodytis, and the country of Arabia Felix.“

Above: A portion of a page from the Venice Haggadah of 1609. Displays the three wives of Abraham and his sons.

From the Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut:

“The image shows Abraham with the three women in his life.

In the center are Sarah and Isaac, on the left are Hagar and Ishmael and on the right are Keturah and her children.“

The Troglodytis Josephus refers to here is generally taken to mean both coasts of the Red Sea. 

However, Josephus goes on to state that the descendants of one of these grandsons, Epher, invaded Libya, and that the name of Africa was thus derived from that of Epher. 

The dominant modern hypothesis is that Africa stems from the Berber word ifri, meaning “cave“, in reference to cave dwellers.

Above: Depiction of Roman-Jewish historian-soldier Flavius Josephus (37 – 100)

Above: Africa (in green) with national borders

Clement of Alexandria (The Stromata) mentions them as the inventors of sambuca.

Above: Depiction of Greek philosopher Clement of Alexandria (150 – 215)

Eusebius, citing Clement of Alexandria, also credits them with the invention of the sambuca.)

Above: Portrait of Greek historian Eusebius of Caesarea (260 – 339)

Perhaps fleeing the violence of Ancient Romans, people left the Dead Sea Scrolls in 11 caves near Qumran, in what is now an area of the West Bank managed by Qumran National Park, in Israel.

The documents remained undisturbed there for about 2,000 years, until their discovery in the 1940s and 1950s.

Above: The Psalms Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Above: Qumran Caves, Judaean Desert, Israel

From about 1000 to about 1300, some Pueblo people lived in villages that they built beneath cliffs in what is now the Southwestern United States.

Above: Sinagua cliff dwelling, Montezuma Castle National Monument, Arizona, USA

The DeSoto Caverns (now named Majestic Caverns), in what became Alabama in the United States, were a burial ground for local tribes.

The same caves became a violent speakeasy in the 1920s.

Above: Majestic Caverns, Childersburg, Alabama, USA

The city of St. Louis was built upon a complex of natural caves which were once used for the lagering of beer by early German immigrant brewers.

Caves are naturally cool, which was especially attractive to brewers before the advent of refrigeration.

Above: Caves of St. Louis, Missouri, USA

The Caves of St. Louis may have been a hiding-place along the Underground Railroad.

(The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the US during the early to mid-19th century.

It was used by enslaved African Americans primarily to escape into free states and from there to Canada. 

The network, primarily the work of free African Americans (and some whites as well), was assisted by abolitionists and others sympathetic to the cause of the escapees. 

The slaves who risked capture and those who aided them are also collectively referred to as the passengers and conductors of the Railroad, respectively. 

Various other routes led to Mexico, where slavery had been abolished, and to islands in the Caribbean that were not part of the slave trade. 

An earlier escape route running south toward Florida, then a Spanish possession, existed from the late 17th century until approximately 1790. 

However, the network generally known as the Underground Railroad began in the late 18th century.

It ran north and grew steadily until the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by US President Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865) on 1 January 1863.

One estimate suggests that, by 1850, approximately 100,000 slaves had escaped to freedom via the network.)

Above: Routes of the Underground Railway

In the 1970s, several members of the Tasaday allegedly inhabited caves near Cotabato, in the Philippines.

Above: Tasaday cave, Cotabato, Philippines

In Hirbet Tawani, near Yatta Village, in the Southern Hebron Hills, in an area contested by the Palestinian Authority and Israel, there are Palestinians living in caves.

People also inhabited caves there during the time of the Ottoman Empire and of the British Mandate for Palestine.

In recent years some have been evicted by the Israeli government and settlers.

Above: Hirbet Tawani Caves

At least 30,000,000 people in China live in cave homes, called yaodongs.

Because they are warm in the winter and cool in the summer, some people find caves more desirable than concrete homes in the city.

Above: Yaodongs, Lingshi County, Province Shanxi, China

In the Australian desert mining towns of Coober Pedy and Lightning Ridge, many families have carved homes into the underground opal mines, to escape the heat.

Above: Umoona Opal Mine, Coober Pedy, South Australia

Above: Sculpted cave, Lightning Ridge, New South Wales, Australia

In Greece, some Christian hermits and saints are known by the epithet “cave dweller” since they lived in cave dwellings.

Examples include Joseph the Cave Dweller (also known as Joseph the Hesychast) and Arsenios the Cave Dweller (1886 – 1983).

Above: Greek cave dweller Joseph the Hesychast (né Francis Kottis) (1897 – 1959)

In England, the rock houses at Kinver Edge were inhabited until the middle of the 20th century.

Above: Holy Austin rock house, Kinver Edge, Staffordshire, England

Nottingham (a place where I once – briefly – lived and worked) is a city that is built on a system of caves that have been expanded by the city’s occupants over the centuries for living and working space.

Some of them are available for the public to tour.

Others continue to be used by homeless people as they always have.

Above: Caves of Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, England

The city, which dates back over 1,000 years, was built a particularly soft form of sandstone called Bunter sandstone.

It has played a major part in the way that the city has expanded.

Above: Nottingham cave

A little history first.

Above: King Street, Nottingham

Nottingham is most famous for being the city of Robin Hood, Sherwood Forest and the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Above: Depiction of Robin Hood on a horse (1475)

(Robin Hood is a legendary heroic outlaw originally depicted in English folklore and subsequently featured in literature, theatre and cinema.

He stole from the rich and gave to the poor.

(Which is a nice change from the rich stealing from the poor.)

According to legend, he was a highly skilled archer and swordsman.

In some versions of the legend, he is depicted as being of noble birth, and in modern retellings he is sometimes depicted as having fought in the Crusades before returning to England to find his lands taken by the Sheriff.

In the oldest known versions, he is instead a member of the yeoman class.

He is traditionally depicted dressed in Lincoln green.)

Above: Robin Hood statue, Nottingham Castle

Above: Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire, England

Above: Depiction of the Sheriff of Nottingham from Bold Robin Hood and His Outlaw Band: Their Famous Exploits in Sherwood Forest (1912)

The Castle which now sits on top of the splendid rock overlooking the city centre is not the original one, which burned down in a fire in the 18th century.

A cave system extends from the Castle down to the ground level and into neighbouring built-up areas.

Above: Nottingham Castle

Directly below, at the bottom of the cliff, is probably the oldest pub in the world:

Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem Inn.

Above: Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem Pub, Nottingham

In the days of pilgrimages to the Holy Land documented in the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, pilgrims would begin their journey at the castle gate and the first stop would be the Inn.

Above: Portrait of English writer Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 – 1400)

The habits of Brits travelling abroad have not changed much over the centuries.

The Inn is carved out of the cliff base.

Looking up to the ceiling you can see a chimney extending right upwards to the Castle above.

Above: Interior of Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem Pub

Many of the buildings in central area of Nottingham have cellars and extended underground areas that were carved out, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The reason for this is that during the Industrial Revolution tens of thousands of people migrated from the countryside to work in the factories in the cities of England.

In Nottingham, this reason was the lacemaking factories.

The city could not expand beyond its tight boundaries because of a complex system of land ownership around the outside.

Everybody living inside had the rights to farm strips of land outside the city walls to grow food, a relic of the feudal system.

They also had the right to walk in the surrounding countryside to get fresh air.

Inside the city walls conditions were dire due to pollution from burning coal and the lack of a sewerage system.

Overcrowding was terrible and in an effort to make more space people burrowed into the soft sandstone, carving out more rooms for both workspace and living space.

The dispossessed lived in the caves.

But this was not a sustainable solution.

Above: Nottingham cave

As in many English cities at this time there was an outbreak of cholera in Nottingham.

Hundreds of people died.

The proper solution was not just to build sewers but to extend the city and build on the surrounding land.

This was the time of the Enclosure Acts in England which were used to appropriate agricultural land for building and development.

In many cases this led to agricultural land, much of which was common land which everybody had a right to use, being grabbed by the rich and fenced off.

Many people starved as a result.

But in Nottingham it was different.

Above: Nottingham Council House

The 1845 Enclosure Act specified that developers or builders must come to an agreement with the owners of the land and those who had the right to use it before it could be built upon.

This process took 15 years to pan out in the courts.

But it was worth it because it was done amicably.

Everyone benefited.

Above: Reeve and serfs, medieval illustration of men harvesting wheat with reaping-hooks or sickles (1310)

One result of this is that certain corridors of green space and parks were kept and are still there today for all people to enjoy.

They provide a vital means by which the city can breathe.

Today you can look at Nottingham from the air or walk around it and see the result of this expansion.

Above: Aerial view of Nottingham

Outside the original compact city is a ring of Victorian buildings, large homes which would have had a room for servants.

These are now in the main subdivided into apartments or used by businesses.

Around that was built rows of small tenement homes for the workers.

Many of these still remain, as in Hyson Green, but others have been since demolished because they grew to be slums, such as the notorious Meadows area between the castle and the River Trent immortalised in local author Alan Sillitoe’s novel (and 1960 film adaptation) Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Above: English writer Alan Sillitoe (1928 – 2010)

The 1930s saw further urban sprawl in the form of large, planned estates of council houses on the lines of garden cities, with generous gardens for the workers to grow their own vegetables, two or three bedrooms and wide roads.

Nowadays hardly anybody unfortunately grows vegetables in these gardens and the front gardens have been paved over for cars, because nobody thought that workers would ever own one, let alone two or three cars, in those days, so no room was provided for them.

Nottingham has sprawled much more since then, with endless badly designed housing estates extending into the countryside.

Above: Nottingham

Very little of Sherwood Forest remains although in mediaeval times it came almost up to the castle itself.

Who knows?

Perhaps Robin Hood and his outlaws used to live in some of the cave systems and used them to creep up upon the Sheriff in his castle.

There is evidence that they are still being used by the homeless.

Above: Nottingham cave

The entrance to the system is meant to be protected by iron railings but they had been tampered with to provide enough space for someone to crawl through.

Inside is evidence that people do in fact sleep there:

There is also evidence of drinking and drug use:

Drug users and homeless people do use the caves.

Cutbacks in Council spending have caused an increase in homelessness.

It is very dark and quiet in the caves.

The rock is soft and crumbly and dry.

It’s also quite scary at first.

There are occasionally roof-falls.

While some of the caves in Nottingham are accessible only through private property, and some are available for visitors to tour, the full extent of the system is unknown and it’s possible to find entrances all over the central part of the city.

Nottingham’s underground culture looks set to continue far into the future.

Above: Nottingham caves

Caves at Sacromonte, near Granada, Spain, are home to about 3,000 Gitano people, whose dwellings range from single rooms to caves of nearly 200 rooms, along with churches, schools, and stores in the caves. 

Above: Cuevas de Sacromonte, Granada, España

From 2021 to 2023, Beatriz Flamini spent 500 days alone in a cave in Granada in an experiment on the effects of social isolation.

Beatriz Flamini is a Spanish extreme athlete and mountaineer known for her acts of self-isolation and self-sufficiency.

She is best known for her “Timecave” expedition, whereby she spent 500 days living in a cave in Granada, from November 2021 to April 2023.

Above: Spanish athlete Beatriz Flamini

Flamini studied to be a sports instructor.

She was employed as an aerobics teacher in Madrid.

Above: Madrid, España

In the 1990s, Flamini joined cave exploring expeditions as a photographer.

She later moved to a mountain refuge in the Sierra de Gredos to be a rescue worker. 

Above: Sierra de Gredos, España

In 2019, she was making preparations to cross Mongolia by foot.

Above: Flag of Mongolia

She moved to Espigüete and began training at Montaña Palentina.

Above: Mount Espigüete, España

She later decided that she was physically capable of the task, but was not mentally prepared for the prolonged isolation.

To prepare for the social isolation in the Mongolian desert, Flamini intended to beat the record of 463 days spent in an underground cave set by Milutin Veljković.

Above: The southern portion of Mongolia is taken up by the Gobi Desert, while the northern and western portions are mountainous.

Flamini planned to be more strict with her seclusion than Veljković, wishing to completely disconnect from human interaction.

Above: Photograph of Serbian speleologist (scientist who studies caves) Milutin Veljković (1935 – 2011) on the cover of the book Pod Kamenim Nebom (Under the Stone Sky) (1972), best known for setting a Guinness World Record for the longest consecutive time spent underground (464 days)

Flamini picked a cave north of Motril in Granada.

Above: Motril, Granada, España

The cave was 230 feet (70 m) deep, and the main chamber measured 3,000 square feet (280 m²) and had 40 feet (12 m) tall ceilings.

The expedition became known as “Timecave“.

On 21 November 2021, Flamini entered the cave at the age of 48.

Her time was spent recreationally exercising, drawing, reading, and knitting. 

She was conscious about maintaining the natural silence of the cave and limited how much she spoke aloud.

Flamini had the ability to send messages above ground, but not to receive them.

She was supported by a group of volunteers, who removed waste, provided food, and maintained her equipment.

Provisions were dead dropped halfway down the cave to limit interaction between support staff and Flamini.

Her experiences were monitored by scientists, including chronobiologists at several Spanish universities.

Above: Beatriz Flamini

In September 2022, approximately 300 days into her isolation, Flamini began experiencing intense discomfort.

She claimed this was due to “inaudible sonic waves” emitted by her emergency communication equipment.

She moved her sleeping tent to the exit of the cave.

She had a brief face-to-face discussion with a member of her team, ending her streak of seclusion.

Her eight days spent at the exit of the cave disqualified her from beating the record set by Veljković.

Flamini emerged from the cave on 14 April 2023.

She stated that she enjoyed her tenure in the cave.

She claimed she could have remained isolated for a further 500 days.

Above: Beatriz Flamini, 14 April 2023

Some families have built modern homes in caves, and renovated old ones, as in Matera, Italy and Spain.

Above: Matera, Italia

In the Loire Valley, abandoned caves are being privately renovated as affordable housing.

Above: Troglodyte caves, Loire Valley, France

In her book Home Life in Colonial Days, Alice Morse Earle wrote of some of the first European settlers in New England, New York and Pennsylvania living in cave dwellings, also known as “smoaky homes“:

In Pennsylvania caves were used by newcomers as homes for a long time, certainly half a century.

They generally were formed by digging into the ground about four feet in depth on the banks or low cliffs near the river front.

The walls were then built up of sods or earth laid on poles or brush.

Thus half only of the chamber was really under ground.

If dug into a side hill, the earth formed at least two walls.

The roofs were layers of tree limbs covered over with sod, or bark, or rushes and bark.

The chimneys were laid of cobblestone or sticks of wood mortared with clay and grass.

The settlers were thankful even for these poor shelters, and declared that they found them comfortable.

By 1685 many families were still living in caves in Pennsylvania, for the Governor’s Council then ordered the caves to be destroyed and filled in.”

Above: American historian-writer Alice Morse Earle (1851- 1911)

In 2003, a Missouri family renovated and moved into a 15,000 square feet (1,400 m²) sandstone cave.

Above: Sleeper cave home, Festus, Missouri, USA

(In 2003, Curt and Deborah Sleeper and their two children were living in a cramped Missouri ranch house when they saw an eBay offering for three acres with an empty sandstone cave.

The family intended to build on the land until they realized the former quarry offered 15,000 feet of naturally insulated space.)

On the northern outskirts of the city of Antequera there are two Bronze Age burial mounds (barrows or dolmens), the Dólmen de Menga and the Dólmen de Viera, dating from the 3rd millennium BC.

They are the largest such structures in Europe.

Above: Antequera, España

The larger one, Dólmen de Menga, is 25 metres in diameter and four metres high, and was built with 32 megaliths, the largest weighing about 180 tonnes.

After completion of the chamber (which probably served as a grave for the ruling families) and the path leading into the centre, the stone structure was covered with earth and built up into the hill that exists today.

When the grave was opened and examined in the 19th century, archaeologists found the skeletons of several hundred people inside.

The Dolmen of Menga (Dolmen de Menga) is a megalithic burial mound called a tumulus, a long barrow form of dolmen, dating from 3750 – 3650 BC approximately.

It is one of the largest known ancient megalithic structures in Europe. 

It is 27.5 metres (90 ft) long, 6 metres (20 ft) wide and 3.5 metres (11 ft) high, and was built with 32 megaliths, the largest weighing about 180 tonnes (200 tons).

After completion of the chamber (which probably served as a grave for the ruling families) and the path leading into the center, the stone structure was covered with soil and built up into the hill that can be seen today.

When the grave was opened and examined in the 19th century, archaeologists found the skeletons of several hundred people inside.

The dolmen sits 70 metres (230 ft) from the Dolmen de Viera and about 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) from another subterranean structure known as Tholos de El Romeral.

Above: Dolmen de Menga, Antequera, España

In 2016, the dolmens of Menga, Viera, and El Romeral were all inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site under the name “Antequera Dolmens Site“.

Above: Logo of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

The Abrigo (shelter) of Matacabras, located at the foot of the northwest face of the Peña de los Enamorados, is closely linked with the Dolmen of Menga whose central axis points directly to it.

Above: Peña de los Enamorados, Antequera

The tomb is orientated to the northeast, north of the sunrise on the summer solstice, and is the only known tomb so oriented in Europe in this cultural context. 

Above: Abrigo de Matacabras

In 2018, the ATLAS research group from the University of Sevilla published a study of the high resolution analysis of Abrigo de Matacabras’s schematic style cave paintings.

Above: Seal of the University of Sevilla (España)

The small cave has both visual and symbolic links to the Menga dolmen, establishing landscape relationships that are possibly unique in European prehistory.

The results confirmed the Neolithic chronology of the cave “probably, at least, at the beginning of the 4th millennium BC and its importance as a place of reference for the Neolithic (and possibly even older) population of the region...” 

Above: Paintings of the Abrigo de Matacabras

The Dolmen de Viera or Dolmen de los Hermanos Viera is a dolmen — a type of single-chamber megalithic tomb — located in Antequera.

It is located only 70 metres (230 ft) from the Dolmen de Menga and about 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) of another structure known as Tholos de El Romeral.

It was discovered between 1903 and 1905 by brothers Antonio and José Viera from Antequera, who also discovered El Romeral.

Above: Entry to the Dolmen de Viera, Antequera

Like the Dolmen de Menga, it is built with an orthostatic technique:

Large stones standing upright. 

It consists of a long corridor formed by 27 stones, leading to a rectangular chamber. 

This is presumed to be a burial chamber, although only silica and bone tools and ceramics were discovered there. 

The burial chamber has different dimensions than the corridor:

A little over 200 centimetres (79 in) high and 180 centimetres (71 in) wide, while the corridor is 185 centimetres (73 in) high and ranges from 130 centimetres (51 in) wide at the entrance to 160 centimetres (63 in) where it meets up with the chamber. 

The corridor is a bit over 21 metres (69 ft) long. 

The stones range from 20 centimetres (7.9 in) to 50 centimetres (20 in) in thickness.

Above: Interior of the Dolmen de Viera

The dolmen is covered by a mound or tumulus 50 metres (160 ft) in diameter. 

Like most Iberian tombs, it is oriented slightly south of east (96°), situated precisely so that at the summer solstices the sunlight at daybreak illuminates the burial chamber.

Above: Dolmen de Viera

The left and right sides of the corridor appear to have consisted originally of 16 slabs each.

14 remain on the left and 15 on the right.

Five larger slabs are intact in the roof.

There are fragments of two others.

It would appear that three or four more have been entirely lost.

Above: Interior of the Dolmen de Viera

The end of the corridor is a single large monolith with a square hole near its centre.

This and three other monoliths surround the chamber. 

There is a notable difference between the stones on the sides and those of the roof:

The former is much more carefully worked and fit perfectly into the recesses made in the stones of the entrance and the floor.

The Dolmen de Viera was built in the Copper Age, 3510 – 3020 BC approximately. 

It has had the status of a national monument since 1923.

The site is owned by the Council of Culture of the Andalusian Autonomous Government, who manage it as part of the Conjunto Arqueológico Dólmenes de Antequera. 

The dolmen was restored recently and is open for visits by the public.

Above: Interior of the Dolmen de Viera

The Dólmen del Romeral, which dates from about 1800 BC, is outside the city.

A large number of smaller stones were used in its construction.

Los Silillos, a significant Bronze Age prehistoric village was uncovered several miles north of Antequera.

From the 7th century BC, the region was settled by the Iberians, whose cultural and economic contacts with the Phoenicians and Greeks are demonstrated by many archaeological discoveries.

In the middle of the 1st millennium BC, the Iberians mingled with wandering Celts and with the civilization of Tartessos of southern Spain. 

Above: Tholos de El Romeral, Antequera

Tholos de El Romeral, situated 2.5 kilometres (1.6 mi) northeast of the town of Antequera (Andalusia), is one of the most important examples of early Bronze Age architecture in southern Europe.

Tholos de El Romeral, also known as Cueva de Romeral (Cave of Romeral) and Dolmen de Romeral, is a megalithic burial site built circa 1800 BC.

Above: Tholos de El Romeral

Tholos de El Romeral is a chambered tomb covered by a mound.

It consists of a long corridor with drystone walls made of small stones and a ceilings made of megalithic slabs.

The corridor culminates with two consecutive round beehive-like chambers.

The larger chamber has a diameter of approximately 4.20 metres (13.8 ft) and has corbelled walls built in the same way as the corridor, projecting inwards and culminating in a megalithic capstone.

The floor of the corridor and main chamber are made of packed earth.

The second chamber is linked to the first by a rectangular corridor (and is not accessible to the public).

It has a diameter of approximately 2 metres (6 ft 7 in), contains a stone slab bier, and the floor of the small room is covered with stone slabs.

Bones and grave goods were found within the dolmen.

Although it is believed that these megalithic buildings had different uses (tombs, temples, etc.) the Romeral Dolmen is certainly a burial site because human remains, shells, and two types of ceramics were found within it.

Above: Tholos de El Romeral

The Dólmen de El Romeral, which dates from about 1800 BC, is outside the city.

A large number of smaller stones were used in its construction.

Above: Interior of Tholos de El Romeral

Los Silillos, a significant Bronze Age prehistoric village was uncovered several miles north of Antequera.

Above: Los Silillos

As we tour the Dolmens, I find myself wondering were they intended as homes for the living or final resting places for the dead?

Staff are present at the parking lot to direct you to the information centre.

From there you are told where the Dolmens are.

But beyond this there was no real sense of the importance of the site nor the purpose it has served given to us by the personnel whose job it is to inform and enlighten.

Above: Visitors Centre, Dolmens of Antequera

The Dolmens make me think of cave dwellers, both ancient and modern.

Above: Skeleton found in the Dolmen de Menga

The one thought that fills my mind is:

“At least, in a cave or sleeping rough there is no rent.“

Renting, also known as hiring or letting, is an agreement where a payment is made for the use of a good, service or property owned by another over a fixed period of time.

To maintain such an agreement, a rental agreement (or lease) is signed to establish the roles and expectations of both the tenant and landlord.

There are many different types of leases. 

The type and terms of a lease are decided by the landlord and agreed upon by the renting tenant.

Various types of rent are referenced in Roman law:

• rent (canon) under the long leasehold tenure of Emphyteusis
• rent (reditus) of a farm
• ground-rent (solarium)
• rent of state lands (vectigal)
• the annual rent (prensio) payable for the jus superficiarum or right to the perpetual enjoyment of anything built on the surface of land

Above: Eagle standard of the Roman Empire (27 BC – 1453)

There are many possible reasons for renting instead of buying, for example:

• In many jurisdictions (including India, Spain, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States) rent paid in a trade or business is tax-deductible, whereas rent on a dwelling is not tax-deductible in most jurisdictions.

• Financial inadequacy, such as renting a house when one is unable to purchase, i.e “renting by necessity“

• Reducing financial risk due to depreciation and transaction costs, especially for real estate which might be needed only for a short amount of time

• When something is needed only temporarily, as in the case of a special tool, a truck or a skip

• When something is needed that may or may not be already owned but is not in proximity for use, such as renting an automobile or bicycle when away on a trip

• Needing a cheaper alternative to buying, such as renting a movie:

A person is unwilling to pay the full price for a movie, so they rent it for a lesser price but give up the chance to view it again later.

• The tenant may want to leave the burden of upkeep of the property (mowing the lawn, shovelling snow, etc.) to the owner or his agents.

• There is no need to worry about lifespan and maintenance.

• Renting keeps off-balance-sheet the debt that would burden the balance sheet of a company in case the property would have been bought.

• Renting is good for the environment if products are used more efficiently by maximizing utility rather than being disposed of, overproduced and underutilized.

• Risks aside, renting has the potential to generate a regular stream of revenue for the owner.

The more the churn (the number of times the item is rented out) the higher the income.

Eventually, the rental income crosses the product procurement value and every churn post that becomes a profit for the owner

Renting often also becomes an alternate revenue pool for idle inventory vs. overly depending on a stagnant / slowing retailing business environment.

Short-term rental of all sorts of products (excluding real estate and holiday apartments) already represents an estimated €108 billion ($160 billion) annual market in Europe and is expected to grow further as the internet makes it easier to find specific items available for rent. 

Above: Flag of the European Union

According to a poll by YouGov, 76% of people looking to rent would go to the Internet first to find what they need, rising to 88% for those aged 25 – 34.

It has been widely reported that the global financial crisis may have contributed to the rapid growth of online rental marketplaces, such as erento, as consumers are more likely to consider renting instead of buying in times of financial hardship.

Above: Former HQ of Lehman Brothers, Times Square, New York City

(The 2007 – 2008 financial crisis, or the global financial crisis (GFC), was the most severe worldwide economic crisis since the Great Depression. 

Predatory lending (unethical practices conducted by lending organizations during a loan origination process that are unfair, deceptive, or fraudulent) in the form of subprime mortgages ( the provision of loans to people in the US who may have difficulty maintaining the repayment schedule) targeting low-income homebuyers, excessive risk-taking by global financial institutions, a continuous buildup of toxic assets (financial assets that have fallen in value significantly and for which there is no longer a functioning market) within banks, and the bursting of the US housing bubble culminated in a “perfect storm“, which led to the Great Recession (2007 – 2009).

(The 2000s United States housing bubble or house price boom or 2000s housing cycle was a sharp run up and subsequent collapse of house asset prices affecting over half of the US states.)

Mortgage-backed securities (MBS) tied to American real estate, as well as a vast web of derivatives (contracts that derive value from the performance of an underlying entity) linked to those MBS, collapsed in value.

Above: An example of an MBS, a bond of the Dutch East India Company (1602 – 1799), dating from 7 November 1622, for the amount of 2,400 guilders, with an interest of 6¼% over a year.

This bond was issued in Middelburg, but signed in Amsterdam.

Translation:

“We, the undersigned accountants of the East India Company in Middelburg, hereby make notice to have accepted, and to have received through the receiver of the afore-mentioned company, from the right honorable Jacob van Neck, Mayor of this City, the sum of 2,400 guilders.

We promise the aforementioned Mayor Jacob van Neck, or the bearer of this document, to pay out, in 12 months’ time from today, the aforementioned sum of 2,400 guilders.

With the interest of this sum being rated at 6¼ % over a period of one year.

This being agreed without bad intent or deceit.

Done in Amsterdam, 7 November 1622.

We promise to pay out at the due date through our bank in Amsterdam ƒ2,400.“

Financial institutions worldwide suffered severe damage, reaching a climax with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers (1850 – 2008) and a subsequent international banking crisis.

The preconditions for the financial crisis were complex and multi-faceted. 

Almost two decades prior, the US government had passed legislation permitting looser financing to promote affordable housing. 

Above: Flag of the United States of America

In 1999, parts of the (US Senator Carter) Glass – (US Congressman Henry B.) Steagall Act of 1932 legislation were repealed, permitting financial institutions to commingle low-risk operations, like commercial banking and insurance, with higher-risk operations such as proprietary trading and investment banking.

Arguably the largest contributor to the conditions necessary for financial collapse was the rapid development in predatory financial products which targeted low-income, low-information homebuyers who largely belonged to racial minorities. 

This market development went unattended by regulators and thus caught the US government by surprise.

Above: Coat of arms of the United States of America

After the onset of the crisis, governments deployed massive bail-outs of financial institutions and other palliative monetary and fiscal policies to prevent a collapse of the global financial system. 

In the US, the $800 billion Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (“the Wall Street bailout“) of 3 October 2008 failed to slow the economic freefall, but the similarly-sized American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which included a substantial payroll tax credit, saw economic indicators reverse and stabilize less than a month after its 17 February 2009 enactment. 

Above: Wall Street, Manhattan, New York City

The crisis sparked the Great Recession which resulted in increases in unemployment and suicide, and decreases in institutional trust and fertility, among other metrics.

The recession was a significant precondition for the European debt crisis (2009 – 2017).

In 2010, the (US Senator Chris) Dodd – (US Congressman Barney) Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was enacted in the US as a response to the crisis to “promote the financial stability of the United States“.

Above: US President Barack Obama meeting with Congressman Barney Frank, Senator Dick Durban and Senator Chris Dodd, 17 June 2009

The Basel III capital and liquidity standards were also adopted by countries around the world.)

Above: Bank for International Settlements, Basel, Switzerland – a committee of banking supervisory authorities that was established by the central bank governors of the Group of Ten (G10) countries in 1974. 

The committee expanded its membership in 2009 and then again in 2014.

As of 2019, the BCBS has 45 members (including Türkiye) from 28 jurisdictions, consisting of central banks and authorities with responsibility of banking regulation.

The committee agrees on standards, such as the aforementioned Basel III standards, for bank capital, liquidity and funding.

Those standards are non-binding high-level principles.

Members are expected but not obliged to undertake effort to implement them e.g. through domestic regulation.

Environmental concerns, fast depreciation of goods, and a more transient workforce also mean that consumers are increasingly searching for rentals online.

Above: Turkish rentals website logo

Above: Turkish rentals website logo

A 2010 US survey found 27% of renters plan to never buy a home.

Net income received, or losses suffered, by an investor from renting of properties is subject to idiosyncratic risk due to the numerous things that can happen to real property and variable behavior of tenants.

There is typically an implied, explicit, or written rental agreement or contract involved to specify the terms of the rental, which are regulated and managed under contract law.

Examples include letting out real estate (real property) for the purpose of housing tenure (where the tenant rents a residence to live in), parking space for a vehicle(s), storage space, whole or portions of properties for business, agricultural, institutional, or government use, or other reasons.

When renting real estate, the person(s) or party who lives in or occupies the real estate is often called a tenant, paying rent to the owner of the property, often called a landlord (or landlady).

The real estate rented may be all or part of almost any real estate, such as an apartment, house, building, business office(s) or suite, land, farm, or merely an inside or outside space to park a vehicle, or store things all under real estate law.

The tenancy agreement for real estate is often called a lease, and usually involves specific property rights in real property, as opposed to chattels.

In India, the rental income on property is taxed under the head “income from house property“.

A deduction of 30% is allowed from total rent which is charged to tax.

The time use of a chattel or other “personal property” is covered under general contract law, but the term lease also nowadays extends to long term rental contracts of more expensive non-real properties such as automobiles, boats, planes, office equipment and so forth.

The distinction in that case is long term versus short term rentals.

Above: Flag of India

Some non-real properties commonly available for rent or lease are:

• motion pictures on VHS or DVD, of audio CDs, of computer programs on CD-ROM

• transport equipment, such as an automobile or a bicycle

• ships and boats, in which case rental is known as chartering, and the rent is known as hire or freight (depending on the type of charter)

• aircraft, in which case rental is known as chartering or leasing if the rental is longer term

• specialized tools, such as a chainsaw, laptop, IT equipment or something more substantial, such as a forklift

• large equipment such as cranes, oil rigs and submarines

• a deckchair or beach chair and umbrella

• furniture

• designer handbags, jewelry, sunglasses and watches

• home appliances, such as washing machines, refrigerators, televisions, microwave ovens and air-conditioning units

In various degrees, renting can involve buying services for various amounts of time, such as staying in a hotel, using a computer in an Internet café, or riding in a taxicab (some forms of English use the term “hiring” for this activity).

As seen from the examples, some rented goods are used on the spot, but usually they are taken along; to help guarantee that they are brought back, one or more of the following applies:

• One shows an identity document.

• One signs a contract.

Any damage already present when renting may be noted down to avoid that the renter is blamed for it when the good is returned.

• One pays a damage deposit (a refundable fee that may be used in part to pay for damage caused by the renter).

If the customer has a credit account with the rental company, they may rent over several months (or years) and will receive a recurring or continuation invoice each rental period until they return the equipment.

In this case deposits are rarely required.

In certain types of rental (sometimes known as operated or wet rental) the charge may be calculated by the rental charge + timesheets of operators or drivers supplied by the rental company to operate the equipment.

This is particularly relevant for crane rental companies.

Sometimes the risk that the good is kept is reduced by it being a special model or having signs on it that cannot easily be removed, making it obvious that it is owned by the rental company.

This is especially effective for goods used in public places, but even when used at home it may help due to social control.

People and businesses that regularly rent goods from a particular company generally have an account with that company, which reduces the administrative procedure (transaction costs) on each occasion.

Above: Apartments to rent, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Signing out books from a library could be considered renting when there is a fee per book.

However the term lending is more common.

Rental of personal property or real property for periods often longer than a year, which is governed by the signing of a lease, is known as leasing.

Leasing is usually used for high-value capital equipment, both in business and by consumers.

A lease in which the renter benefits from an increase in value of the asset is known as a finance lease.

A leasing agreement which is not a finance lease is known as an operating lease.

In housing, when a tenant rents an apartment but only pays for their room and the common space is a lease-by-room arrangement.

A rental agreement may provide for the renter or lessee to become the owner of the asset at the end of the rental period, usually at the renter’s option on payment of a nominal fee.

Such arrangements may be known as

• Rent-to-own, a term used in the US for rental of furniture or appliances.

The term is also used in the US for real estate transactions, where the tenant has an option to purchase the property at a fixed price at a specified future time.

Such arrangements are also known as lease-option, lease-to-own or lease to purchase option.

• Hire purchase, used in the UK and other countries for the purchase of cars, other consumer equipment and business equipment.

The term lease-purchase is also used.

• Closed-end leasing, used in the US and Canada for the leasing of cars.

Unlike in hire purchase, the asset is sold at its residual value at the end of the term, rather than for a nominal amount.

Rent was much on my mind during this trip, because I had recently been compelled to move from a 3 1/2 apartment to a 1 1/2 apartment, with the 1 1/2 nearly twice as expensive as the 3 1/2.

I had, from March 2022 to June 2024, subleased a friend‘s furnished flat when he was transferred from Eskişehir to Ankara.

Above: Ankara, the capital of Türkiye

I prefer furnished flats that, except for books and clothes, I can simply leave behind when I feel that it is time to move on.

My rent was initially was TL 1, 700 plus utilities.

There was a rent increase in July 2022 to TL 2,000 plus utilities.

I complained bitterly.

I felt then as I feel now that rent increases are about the wealthy taking advantage of the less fortunate by using inflation as an excuse to get more money from those already in financial difficulty.

Rents increase but salaries do not.

I paid my friend, used his furniture and he paid the rent.

The arrangement was working well.

June 2023 saw my rent go up again from TL 2,000 to TL 3,500.

The excuse given by the property owners was that rents were rising in my neighbourhood to around TL 4,500.

My friend was able to negotiate the price to TL 3,500.

I didn’t like it, but I paid.

Then this May, my friend announced he was moving to Canada with his new bride and that he was closing the apartment.

This annoyed me greatly, for I could easily have continued to pay the rent electronically as before, and, as well, at both their wedding and the announcement that she would be studying in Vancouver for a year they had promised me that my status as a sub-leasor would not change.

Above: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

The property owners wanted me to cough up TL 31,000 for a new contract between myself and them.

And I would be required to pay TL 11,000 every subsequent month.

As well, my friend expected me to buy his furniture for an additional TL 10,000.

I refused.

My argument was that the property owners were providing nothing more for the increase in rent.

It was the same reason I had left my first Eskişehir flat.

The owners there had wanted me to pay more rent but offered fewer utilities than before.

I would pay more for less.

Until the end I remained adamant about not paying more than TL 3,500.

I felt they were greedy and did not give a damn about how difficult a situation they had placed me in.

Apparently being a good person, a good tenant who paid the rent on time every month, who paid the utilities and caused no disturbance whatsoever in the building, was not sufficient enough for the owners to trust that I would continue to do so without my friend as an intermediary.

I gave my friend three options:

I would pay TL 10,000 per month through the continued sublease.

I would pay TL 3,500 and leave by the end of June.

They could evict me and my friend‘s furniture.

In the end, I paid TL 3,500, my friend paid the owners the additional TL 6,500 they demanded – (He has a more lucrative job than I do.) – and I found a “student residency” 1 1/2 flat for TL 6,000 (including utilities) with the lease ending in November.

I knew I would have to move from my friend‘s flat upon my return from my Spanish vacation.

Despite not having bought my friend‘s furniture I have acquired many books in the three and a half years I have lived here, so, logistically, it would still be challenging to move.

Of course, my friend, under pressure from the property owners, wanted me to evict his apartment well before the end of the month, but I stood my ground.

The rent was paid until the end of the month so I felt that I had a right to remain there just as long.

The whole experience left a sour taste in my mouth and made me long for the life I once had (despite its hand-to-mouth precariousness) when I walked across Canada and hitched around North America and Europe.

Above: Canada Slim, your humble blogger

In many ways, civilization is a trap.

We need shelter from the elements.

We are seduced by materialism to fill our living spaces.

We work to finance that shelter, clothing and the food that sustains us.

We are victims of the workplace in that we make ourselves financially dependent upon the whims of our employers.

In my pre-martial days, I slept rough and was blessed by the kindness and generosity of strangers.

But the good are outnumbered by the greedy in the stability of civilization.

I like having a flat with my own keys and filling that flat with my own library.

I am possessed by my possessions, though I own only books and clothes.

Perhaps had my wife and I been blessed with children my attıtude might be drastically different.

I ask myself:

Could I live in a cave?

Could I return to the rough roaming I once did?

I think of the skeletons said to have been found at the Dolmens.

These died in the time before writing.

There is little to distinguish one skeleton from the other.

I think of my wife’s desire to be cremated upon her demise.

Yet she loves wandering through cemeteries.

I am reminded that one of my oldest friends was cremated with there being little to remind anyone that he existed beyond photographs and memories.

I am reminded that my biological mother’s body lies in an anonymous “pauper’s field” within a Fort Lauderdale cemetery with nothing indicating that she ever existed.

Just as the Antequera Bullring before, our visit to the Dolmens makes me question matters of life and death.

Do we live just to finance that life?

Is there no meaning to a man’s life once he has died?

I am aware that once someone dies there is no awareness of the world they left.

Whether I am cremated or buried, unless I left some kind of lasting legacy, my very existence will eventually be forgotten and I myself will no longer care about what others may have felt about me.

And this feels inherently wrong to me.

I know that I may desire a grave and a marker but once I have abandoned this mortal coil what happens to my remains, whether bones or ashes, will be beyond my control.

As I view the empty hollows of the Dolmens, the jukebox of my mind plays Gordon Lightfoot’s “Carefree Highway“:

Picking up the pieces of my sweet shattered dream,
I wonder how the old folks are tonight.
Her name was Ann,
And I’ll be damned if I recall her face.
She left me not knowing what to do.

Carefree highway,
Let me slip away on you.
Carefree highway,
You’ve seen better days.
Got the morning-after blues
From my head down to my shoes.
Carefree highway,
Let me slip away, slip away on you

Turning back the pages to the times I love best,
I wonder if she’ll ever do the same.
Now the thing that I call living
Is just being satisfied
With knowing I got no one left to blame.

Carefree highway,
I’ve got to see you, my old flame.
Carefree highway,
You’ve seen better days.
Got the morning-after blues
From my head down to my shoes.
Carefree highway,
Let me slip away, slip away on you

Searching through the fragments
Of my dream-shattered sleep,
I wonder if the years have closed her mind.
I guess it must be wanderlust or trying to get free
From the good old faithful feeling we once knew.

Carefree highway,
Let me slip away on you.
Carefree highway,
You’ve seen the better days.
Got the morning-after blues
From my head down to my shoes.
Carefree highway,
Let me slip away, slip away on you
Let me slip away on you

Carefree highway,
I’ve got to see you, my old flame.
Carefree highway,
You’ve seen better days.
Got the morning-after blues
From my head down to my shoes.
Carefree highway,
Let me slip away, slip away on you.

I am reminded of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road:

“I woke up as the sun was reddening.

And that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.

I wasn’t scared.

I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.

I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.“

“We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad.“

“For Life is holy and every moment is precious.“

“Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the Desert of Life and was bound to catch us before we reached Heaven. 

Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death:

Death will overtake us before Heaven.

The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.“

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop.

This is the night, what it does to you. 

I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.“

“We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one noble function of the time, move.“

“Why think about that when all the golden land is ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you’re alive to see?“

“They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there — and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see.

But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace until they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flits by them and they know it and that too worries them no end.“

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again.

We had longer ways to go.

But no matter, the road is Life.“

“Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men’s souls to joy.“

“What difference does it make after all? 

Anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in Heaven, for what’s Heaven?

What’s Earth? 

All in the mind.“

“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at somedaywith wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of Life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road.“

“I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams.“

Is Life only livable without the disillusionment and disappointment of dreams, Jack?

Can we rest in peace in Life as it is surmised we rest in peace in Death?

What do most of us dream about?

A better life than the one we presently live?

If this is so, then is there no joy in the moment despite its imperfections?

I wonder:

How did these who once inhabited these Dolmens live their lives?

Were they happier than we are today or is unhappiness part of the human condition?

There are no explanations forthcoming from those who monitor and maintain this site.

It is maintained and monitored by the money of visitors.

It exists because of those who came before.

Our tickets lease a piece of the past.

We inhabit for the merest of moments the abode of the ghosts of Yesteryear.

I’m just a man, but I know that I’m damned.
All the dead seem to know where I am.
The tale that began on the night of my birth
Will be done in a turn of the Earth.

Lie where I land, let my bones turn to sand.
I was born on the lake and I don’t want to leave it.
Every eye on the coast ever more
Will remember the sight of the ghost on the shore.

Under the waves and the Earth of an age
Lie a thousand old northerners’ graves.
Deep in the night, when the moon’s glowing bright
They come rising up into the night.

Die if I must, let my bones turn to dust.
I’m the Lord of the Lake and I don’t want to leave it.
All who sail off the coast ever more
Will remember the tale of the ghost on the shore.

I’m goin’ away for a long, long time.
I’m goin’ away for a long, long time.

Lie where I land, let my bones turn to sand.
I was born on the lake and I don’t want to leave it.
Every eye on the coast ever more
Will remember the sight of the ghost on the shore.

Die if I must, let my bones turn to dust
I’m the Lord of the Lake and I don’t want to leave it
All who sail off the coast ever more
Will remember the tale of the ghost on the shore.

I’m goin’ away for a long, long time.

The cost is low when our mutual incomes are considered.

The investment is high when time is spent considering matters beyond my ken.

If Man ever built a time machine, would we understand the worlds of the past we might visit or would the landscape of Yesterday be as incomprehensible as the prospect of Tomorrow?

The technology of the past might have been limited but this does not mean that the intelligence and imagination of our forefathers was lacking or deficient.

What did they think?

What did they dream?

Could they dream if their capabilities were diminished by the lack of technological advancement?

Does technology necessarily mean a betterment of life?

I remain unconvinced.

SMS and emojis have replaced the love letter and the phone call.

We can travel faster and further, but in reaching our destination quicker we deny ourselves the joys of the journey.

Perhaps in leaving the uncertainty of the treetops we traded adventure for security.

In trying to eliminate chaos we eliminated the lessons that chaos can teach us.

In life we carry cards that identify who we are.

In death we are stripped of all that gave us identity.

In life we pretend that the finery we wear creates character in our person.

In death even the flesh that defined us as individuals dissipates into nothingness.

There’s a little black spot on the sun today
It’s the same old thing as yesterday
There’s a black hat caught in a high tree top
There’s a flag pole rag and the wind won’t stop

I have stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running ’round my brain
I guess I’m always hoping that you’ll end this reign
But it’s my destiny to be the king of pain

There’s a little black spot on the sun today
(That’s my soul up there)
It’s the same old thing as yesterday
(That’s my soul up there)
There’s a black hat caught in a high tree top
(That’s my soul up there)
There’s a flag pole rag and the wind won’t stop
(That’s my soul up there)

I have stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running ’round my brain
I guess I’m always hoping that you’ll end this reign
But it’s my destiny to be the king of pain

There’s a fossil that’s trapped in a high cliff wall
(That’s my soul up there)
There’s a dead salmon frozen in a waterfall
(That’s my soul up there)
There’s a blue whale beached by a springtime’s ebb
(That’s my soul up there)
There’s a butterfly trapped in a spider’s web
(That’s my soul up there)

I’ve stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running ’round my brain
I guess I’m always hoping that you’ll end this reign
But it’s my destiny to be the king of pain

There’s a king on a throne with his eyes torn out
There’s a blind man looking for a shadow of doubt
There’s a rich man sleeping on a golden bed
There’s a skeleton choking on a crust of bread

King of pain

There’s a red fox torn by a huntsman’s pack
(That’s my soul up there)
There’s a black-winged gull with a broken back
(That’s my soul up there)
There’s a little black spot on the sun today
It’s the same old thing as yesterday

I’ve stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running ’round my brain
I guess I’m always hoping that you’ll end this reign
But it’s my destiny to be the king of pain

King of pain
King of pain
King of pain
I’ll always be king of pain
I’ll always be king of pain
I’ll always be king of pain
I’ll always be king of pain
I’ll always be king of pain
I’ll always be king of pain
I’ll always be king of pain

Do we live just to make a living?

Do we dare to dream of a life that means more than living above our present means?

Or could our present means be preventing us from truly living?

The jukebox plays “The Logical Song“:

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful
A miracle, oh, it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees, well, they’d be singing so happily
Oh, joyfully, oh, playfully, watching me.
But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible,
Logical, oh, responsible, practical.
Then they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
Oh, clinical, oh, intellectual, cynical.

There are times when all the world’s asleep.
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man
Won’t you please, please, tell me what we’ve learned?
I know it sounds absurd.
Please tell me who I am.

I said, now, watch what you say, they’ll be calling you a radical,
A liberal, oh, fanatical, criminal.
Oh, won’t you sign up your name? We’d like to feel you’re acceptable,
Respectable, oh, presentable, a vegetable.
Oh, take, take, take it, yeah.

But at night, when all the world’s asleep
The questions run so deep
For such a simple man.
Won’t you please (oh, won’t you tell me)
Please tell me what we’ve learned?
(Can you hear me?) I know it sounds absurd
(Oh, won’t you tell me?) Please tell me who I am,
Who I am, who I am, who I am.

Ooh
Hey

‘Cause I was feeling so logical
Yeah
D-D-D-D-D-D-D-Digital
Yeah, one, two, three, five
Oh, oh, oh, oh, yeah
Ooh, it’s getting unbelievable
Yeah
Getting, getting, yeah, yeah
Uh, uh, uh, uh.

I find myself thinking of philosophy, of Plato’s allegory of the cave.

Above: Bust of Greek philosopher (427 – 348 BC)

In the allegory, Plato describes people who have spent their lives chained in a cave facing a blank wall.

They watch shadows projected onto the wall by objects passing in front of a fire behind them, and they give names to these shadows.

The shadows are the prisoners’ reality but not accurate representations of the real world.

The shadows represent the fragment of reality that we can normally perceive through our senses, while the objects under the sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason.

Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are actually not the direct source of the images seen.

Above: Bust of Greek philosopher and Plato’s mentor Socrates (470 – 399 BC)

A philosopher aims to understand and perceive the higher levels of reality.

However, the other inmates of the cave do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life.

Plato begins by having Socrates ask Glaucon (Plato’s brother) to imagine a cave where people have been imprisoned from childhood.

These prisoners are chained so that their legs and necks are fixed, forcing them to gaze at the wall in front of them and not to look around at the cave, each other, or themselves. 

Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway with a low wall, behind which people walk carrying objects or puppets “of men and other living things“.

The people walk behind the wall so their bodies do not cast shadows for the prisoners to see, but the objects they carry do (“just as puppet showmen have screens in front of them at which they work their puppets“). 

The prisoners cannot see any of what is happening behind them.

They are only able to see the shadows cast upon the cave wall in front of them.

The sounds of the people talking echo off the walls.

The prisoners believe these sounds come from the shadows.

Socrates suggests that the shadows are reality for the prisoners because they have never seen anything else.

They do not realize that what they see are shadows of objects in front of a fire, much less that these objects are inspired by real things outside the cave which they do not see.

Socrates then supposes that the prisoners are released. 

A freed prisoner would look around and see the fire.

The light would hurt his eyes and make it difficult for him to see the objects casting the shadows.

If he were told that what he is seeing is real instead of the other version of reality he sees on the wall, he would not believe it.

In his pain, Socrates continues, the freed prisoner would turn away and run back to what he is accustomed to (that is, the shadows of the carried objects).

The light “would hurt his eyes, and he would escape by turning away to the things which he was able to look at, and these he would believe to be clearer than what was being shown to him.”

Socrates continues:

“Suppose that someone should drag him by force, up the rough ascent, the steep way up, and never stop until he could drag him out into the light of the sun.” 

The prisoner would be angry and in pain, and this would only worsen when the radiant light of the sun overwhelms his eyes and blinds him.

“Slowly, his eyes adjust to the light of the sun.

First he can see only shadows.

Gradually he can see the reflections of people and things in water and then later see the people and things themselves.

Eventually, he is able to look at the stars and moon at night until finally he can look upon the sun itself.” 

Only after he can look straight at the sun “is he able to reason about it” and what it is. 

Socrates continues, saying that the free prisoner would think that the world outside the cave was superior to the world he experienced in the cave and attempt to share this with the prisoners remaining in the cave attempting to bring them onto the journey he had just endured.

“He would bless himself for the change, and pity the other prisoners” and would want to bring his fellow cave dwellers out of the cave and into the sunlight.

The returning prisoner, whose eyes have become accustomed to the sunlight, would be blind when he re-entered the cave, just as he was when he was first exposed to the sun. 

The prisoners who remained, according to the dialogue, would infer from the returning man’s blindness that the journey out of the cave had harmed him and that they should not undertake a similar journey.

Socrates concludes that the prisoners, if they were able, would therefore reach out and kill anyone who attempted to drag them out of the cave.

The allegory is related to Plato’s Theory of Forms, according to which the “forms” (ideas), and not the material world known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality.

Knowledge of the Forms constitutes real knowledge or what Socrates considers “the Good“. 

Socrates informs Glaucon that the most excellent people must follow the highest of all studies, which is to behold the Good.

Those who have ascended to this highest level, however, must not remain there but must return to the cave and dwell with the prisoners, sharing in their labours and honours.

Plato’s Phaedo contains similar imagery to that of the allegory of the cave.

A philosopher recognizes that before philosophy, his soul was “a veritable prisoner fast bound within his body… and that instead of investigating reality of itself and in itself is compelled to peer through the bars of a prison.”

Scholars debate the possible interpretations of the allegory of the cave, either looking at it from an epistemological standpoint — one based on the study of how Plato believes we come to know things—or through a political (politeia) lens. 

Much of the scholarship on the allegory falls between these two perspectives, with some completely independent of either.

The epistemological view and the political view, prominently represented by Richard Lewis Nettleship and Adam Ferguson, respectively, tend to be discussed most frequently.

Nettleship interprets the allegory of the cave as representative of our innate intellectual incapacity, in order to contrast our lesser understanding with that of the philosopher, as well as an allegory about people who are unable or unwilling to seek truth and wisdom. 

Above: English philosopher Richard Lewis Nettleship (1846 – 1892)

Ferguson, on the other hand, bases his interpretation of the allegory on the claim that the cave is an allegory of human nature and that it symbolizes the opposition between the philosopher and the corruption of the prevailing political condition.

Above: Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson (1723 – 1816)

Cleavages have emerged within these respective camps of thought, however.

Much of the modern scholarly debate surrounding the allegory has emerged from Martin Heidegger’s exploration of the allegory, and philosophy as a whole, through the lens of human freedom in his book The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy and The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus. 

Above: German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976)

In response, Hannah Arendt, an advocate of the political interpretation of the allegory, suggests that through the allegory, Plato “wanted to apply his own theory of ideas to politics“. 

Above: German-American historian-philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975)

Conversely, Heidegger argues that the essence of truth is a way of being and not an object. 

Arendt criticised Heidegger’s interpretation of the allegory, writing that:

“Heidegger is off base in using the cave simile to interpret and ‘criticize’ Plato’s theory of ideas.”

The themes and imagery of Plato’s cave has influenced civil thought and culture.

For instance:

• Francis Bacon used the term “Idols of the Cave” to refer to errors of reason arising from the idiosyncratic biases and preoccupations of individuals.

Idola specus, normally translated as “Idols of the Cave” (or “Idols of the Den“), is a type of logical fallacy whereby the peculiar biases of individuals lead them to errors.

This Latin term was coined by Sir Francis Bacon and used in his Novum Organum, one of the earliest treatises arguing the case for the logic and method of modern science.

He described them as deriving from “the peculiar constitution, mental or bodily, of each individual, and also in education, habit and accident“.

“The Idols of the Cave are the idols of the individual man.

For everyone (besides the errors common to human nature in general) has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature, owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature, or to his education and conversation with others, or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires, or to the differences of impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed or in a mind indifferent and settled, or the like.

So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in fact a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance.

Whence it was well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world.“

Above: English philosopher-statesman Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626)

• In his 1658 discourse, Urn Burial, Thomas Browne states:

“A dialogue between two infants in the womb concerning the state of this world, might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof methinks we yet discourse in Plato’s den, and are but embryonic philosophers“.

Above: English polymath Thomas Browne (1605 – 1682)

• Evolutionary biologist Jeremy Griffith’s book A Species In Denial includes the chapter “Deciphering Plato’s Cave Allegory“.

Above: Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith

• The films The Conformist, The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, Cube, Dark City, The Truman Show, Us and City of Ember model Plato’s allegory of the cave, as does the TV series 1899.

• The Conformist (Il conformista) is a 1970 political drama film written and directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, based on the 1951 novel of the same title by Alberto Moravia.

Set in 1930s Italy, The Conformist centers on a mid-level Fascist functionary (Trintignant) who is ordered to assassinate his former professor, an anti-Fascist dissident in Paris.

His mission is complicated after he begins an affair with the professor’s wife (Sanda).

In 1938 Paris, Marcello Clerici finalises his preparations to assassinate his former college professor, Luca Quadri, leaving his wife Giulia in their hotel room.

After receiving a call, Marcello is picked up in a car driven by his subordinate, Special Agent Manganiello.

A series of flashbacks depict Marcello discussing with his blind friend Italo his plans to marry, his attempts to join the Fascist secret police, and his visits to his parents in Rome:

A morphine-addicted mother at the family’s decaying villa and his father at an insane asylum.

In a flashback to 1917, Marcello is a boy who is humiliated by his schoolmates until he is rescued by Lino, a chauffeur.

Lino shows him a pistol and then sexually assaults Marcello.

He partially responds to them before grabbing the pistol and shooting into the walls and into Lino.

He then flees, believing he committed a murder.

In another flashback, Marcello and Giulia discuss the necessity of his going to confession, even though he is an atheist, in order for her Roman Catholic parents to allow them to marry.

Marcello agrees and, in confession, admits to the priest to have committed several sins, including his rape by and subsequent murder of Lino, premarital sex, and his absence of guilt for these sins.

Marcello admits he thinks little of Giulia but craves the normality that a traditional marriage with children will bring.

The priest is shocked but absolves Marcello once he hears that he is working for the Fascist secret police.

In Ventimiglia, Marcello meets with Fascist officer Raoul, who orders him to assassinate Professor Quadri, an outspoken anti-Fascist intellectual now living in exile in France.

Using his honeymoon as a cover, he takes Giulia to Paris where he can carry out the mission.

While visiting Quadri, Marcello falls in love with Anna, the professor’s wife, and pursues her.

Although she and her husband are aware of Marcello’s dangerous Fascist sympathies, she responds to his advances and forms a close attachment to Giulia, towards whom she also makes sexual advances.

Giulia and Anna dress extravagantly and go to a dance hall with their husbands, where Marcello’s commitment to the Fascists is tested by Quadri.

Manganiello is also there, having been following Marcello for some time and doubtful of his intentions.

Marcello secretly returns the gun that he has been given and gives Manganiello the location of Quadri’s country house in Savoy, where the couple plan to go the following day.

Even though Marcello has warned Anna not to go to the country with her husband, she makes the car journey nevertheless.

On a deserted alpine road, Fascist agents fatally stab Quadri as Anna watches in horror.

When the men turn their attention to her, she runs to the car behind for help.

When Anna sees that the passenger in the back seat of the car is Marcello and realizes his betrayal, she begins to scream, before running into the woods to escape the agents.

Marcello watches as she is pursued through the woods and shot to death.

Manganiello walks away from the car for a cigarette, disgusted with what he sees as Marcello’s cowardice in not shooting Anna when she ran to their car.

In 1943, amidst Benito Mussolini’s resignation and the fall of the Fascist regime in Italy, Marcello now has a daughter with Giulia and is apparently settled in a conventional life.

While walking on the streets of Rome one night, Marcello and Italo overhear a conversation between two men.

Marcello recognises one of them as Lino, who survived Marcello’s attack.

Marcello publicly denounces Lino as a Fascist, homosexual and the murderer of the Quadris.

In his frenzy, he also denounces Italo as a Fascist.

As an anti-Fascist crowd sweeps past, taking Italo with them, Marcello sits near a small fire and stares behind him at the young man Lino had been talking to, now naked on a bed.

The film is a case study in the psychology of conformism and fascism:

Marcello Clerici is a bureaucrat, cultivated and intellectual but largely dehumanized by an intense need to be “normal” and to belong to whatever is the current dominant socio-political group.

He grew up in an upper class, perhaps dysfunctional family, and he suffered a major childhood sexual trauma and gun violence episode in which he long believed (erroneously) that he had committed a murder.

He accepts an assignment from Benito Mussolini’s secret police to assassinate his former mentor, living in exile in Paris.

In Trintignant’s characterization, Clerici is willing to sacrifice his values in the interests of building a supposedly “normal life“.

According to the political philosopher Takis Fotopoulos: “This psychological need to conform and be ‘normal’ at the social level, in general, and the political level, in particular, was beautifully portrayed” by The Conformist.

Above: Greek political philosopher Takis Fotopoulos

According to the 1992 documentary Visions of Light, the film is widely praised as a visual masterpiece.

It was photographed by Vittorio Storaro, who used rich colours, authentic wardrobe of the 1930s and a series of unusual camera angles and fluid camera movement.

Film critic and author Robin Buss wrote that the cinematography suggests Clerici’s inability to conform with “normal” reality:

The reality of the time is “abnormal“. 

Also, Bertolucci’s cinematic style synthesises expressionism and “fascist” film aesthetics.

Its style has been compared with classic German films of the 1920s and 1930s, such as in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) (1935) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).

• The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction action film written and directed by the Wachowskis. 

It depicts a dystopian future in which humanity is unknowingly trapped inside the Matrix, a simulated reality that intelligent machines have created to distract humans while using their bodies as an energy source. 

When computer programmer Thomas Anderson, under the hacker alias “Neo“, uncovers the truth, he joins a rebellion against the machines along with other people who have been freed from the Matrix.

The Matrix is an example of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. 

The Wachowskis’ approach to action scenes was influenced by anime and martial arts films (particularly fight choreographers and wire fu techniques from Hong Kong action cinema).

Other influences include Plato’s cave and 1990s Telnet hacker communities.

The film popularized terms such as the red pill, and introduced a visual effect known as “bullet time“, in which the heightened perception of certain characters is represented by allowing the action within a shot to progress in slow motion while the camera appears to move through the scene at normal speed, allowing the sped-up movements of certain characters to be perceived normally.

At an abandoned hotel, a police squad corners Trinity, who overpowers them with superhuman abilities.

She flees, pursued by the police and a group of suited Agents capable of similar superhuman feats.

She answers a ringing public telephone and vanishes.

Computer programmer Thomas Anderson, known by his hacking alias “Neo“, is puzzled by repeated online encounters with the phrase “the Matrix“.

Trinity contacts him and tells him a man named Morpheus has the answers Neo seeks.

A team of Agents and police, led by Agent Smith, arrives at Neo’s workplace in search of him.

Though Morpheus attempts to guide Neo to safety, Neo surrenders rather than risk a dangerous escape.

The Agents offer to erase Neo’s criminal record in exchange for his help with locating Morpheus, who they claim is a terrorist.

When Neo refuses to cooperate, they fuse his mouth shut, pin him down, and implant a robotic “bug” in his abdomen.

Neo wakes up from what he believes to be a nightmare.

Soon after, Neo is taken by Trinity to meet Morpheus.

She removes the bug from Neo.

Morpheus offers Neo a choice between two pills:

Red to reveal the truth about the Matrix, or blue to make Neo forget everything and return to his former life.

Neo takes the red pill, and his reality begins to distort until he awakens in a liquid-filled pod among countless other pods, containing other humans.

He is then brought aboard Morpheus’s flying ship, the Nebuchadnezzar.

As Neo recuperates from a lifetime of physical inactivity in the pod, Morpheus explains the history:

In the early 21st century, humanity had developed intelligent machines before war broke out between the two sides.

After humans blocked the machines’ access to solar energy, the machines responded by enslaving humankind and harvesting their bioelectric power while keeping their minds pacified in the Matrix, a shared simulated reality modeled on the world as it was in 1999.

In the years following, the remaining free humans took refuge in the underground city of Zion.

Morpheus and his crew are a group of rebels who hack into the Matrix to “unplug” enslaved humans and recruit them.

Their understanding of the Matrix’s simulated nature allows them to bend its physical laws.

Morpheus warns Neo that death within the Matrix kills the physical body too and explains that the Agents are sentient programs that eliminate threats to the system, while machines called Sentinels eliminate rebels in the real world.

Neo’s prowess during virtual training cements Morpheus’s belief that Neo is “the One“, a human prophesied to free humankind.

The group enters the Matrix to visit the Oracle, a prophet-like program who predicted that the One would emerge.

She implies to Neo that he is not the One and warns that he will have to choose between Morpheus’s life and his own.

Before they can leave the Matrix, Agents and police ambush the group, tipped off by Cypher, a disgruntled crew member who has betrayed Morpheus in exchange for a deal to be plugged back into the Matrix to live a comfortable life.

To buy time for the others, Morpheus fights Smith and is captured.

Cypher exits the Matrix and murders the other crew members as they lie unconscious.

Before Cypher can kill Neo and Trinity, crew member Tank regains consciousness and kills him before pulling Neo and Trinity from the Matrix.

The Agents interrogate Morpheus to learn his access codes to the mainframe computer in Zion, which would allow them to destroy it.

Neo resolves to return to the Matrix to rescue Morpheus, as the Oracle prophesied.

Trinity insists she accompany him.

While rescuing Morpheus, Neo gains confidence in his abilities, performing feats comparable to those of the Agents.

After Morpheus and Trinity safely exit the Matrix, Smith ambushes and appears to kill Neo.

While a group of Sentinels attack the Nebuchadnezzar, Trinity confesses her love for Neo and says the Oracle told her she would fall in love with the One.

Neo is revived, with newfound abilities to perceive and control the Matrix.

He easily defeats Smith, prompting the other Agents to flee.

He leaves the Matrix just as the ship’s electromagnetic pulse disables the Sentinels.

Back in the Matrix, Neo makes a telephone call, promising the machines that he will show their prisoners “a world where anything is possible“, before he hangs up and flies away.

The Matrix draws from and alludes to numerous cinematic and literary works, and concepts from mythology, religion and philosophy, including the ideas of Buddhism, Christianity, Gnosticism, Hinduism and Judaism.

In The Matrix, a copy of Jean Baudrillard’s philosophical work Simulacra and Simulation, which was published in French in 1981, is visible on-screen as “the book used to conceal disks“. 

Morpheus quotes the phrase “desert of the real” from it. 

The book was required reading for the actors prior to filming. 

However, Baudrillard himself said that The Matrix misunderstands and distorts his work. 

Some interpreters of The Matrix mention Baudrillard’s philosophy to support their claim “that the film is an allegory for contemporary experience in a heavily commercialized, media-driven society, especially in developed countries“. 

Above: French sociologist-philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929 – 2007)

The influence of The Matrixial Gaze, the philosophical-psychoanalytical concept of Bracha L. Ettinger on the archaic matrixial space that resists the field of simulacra, “was brought to the public’s attention through the writings of art historians such as Griselda Pollock and film theorists such as Heinz-Peter Schwerfel“. 

Above: French philosopher Bracha L. Ettinger

Above: South African – Canadian art historian Griselda Pollack

Above: Film theorist Heinz Peter Schwerfel

In addition to Baudrillard and Ettinger, the Wachowskis were also significantly influenced by Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, and Dylan Evans’s ideas on evolutionary psychology.

Above: American writer Kevin Kelly

Above: English psychologist-philosopher Dylan Evans

Philosopher William Irwin suggests that the idea of the “Matrix” – a generated reality invented by malicious machines – is an allusion to Descartes’ “First Meditation“, and his idea of an evil demon.

The Meditation hypothesizes that the perceived world might be a comprehensive illusion created to deceive us. 

Above: French philosopher René Descartes (1596 – 1650)

The same premise can be found in Hilary Putnam’s brain in a vat scenario proposed in the 1980s. 

Above: American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926 – 2016)

A connection between the premise of The Matrix and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave has also been suggested.

The allegory is related to Plato’s Theory of Forms, which holds that the true essence of an object is not what we perceive with our senses, but rather its quality, and that most people perceive only the shadow of the object and are thus limited to false perception.

Above: Depiction of Plato

The philosophy of Immanuel Kant has also been claimed as another influence on the film, and in particular how individuals within the Matrix interact with one another and with the system.

Kant states in his Critique of Pure Reason that people come to know and explore our world through synthetic means (language, etc.), and thus this makes it rather difficult to discern truth from falsely perceived views.

This means people are their own agents of deceit, and so in order for them to know truth, they must choose to openly pursue truth.

Above: German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804)

This idea can be examined in Agent Smith’s monologue about the first version of the Matrix, which was designed as a human Utopia, a perfect world without suffering and with total happiness.

Agent Smith explains that:

“It was a disaster.

No one accepted the program.

Entire crops of people were lost.”

The machines had to amend their choice of programming in order to make people subservient to them, and so they conceived the Matrix in the image of the world in 1999.

The world in 1999 was far from a Utopia, but still humans accepted this over the suffering-less Utopia.

According to William Irwin, this is Kantian, because the machines wished to impose a perfect world on humans in an attempt to keep people content, so that they would remain completely submissive to the machines, both consciously and subconsciously, but humans were not easy to make content.

• The Thirteenth Floor is a 1999 science fiction neo-noir film.

In 1999 Los Angeles, Hannon Fuller owns a multibillion-dollar computer enterprise and is the inventor of a newly completed virtual reality (VR) simulation of 1937 Los Angeles, filled with simulated humans unaware they are computer programs.

When Fuller is murdered just as he begins premature testing of the VR system, his friend and protégé, Douglas Hall, who is also the heir to the company, becomes the primary suspect.

The evidence against him is so strong that Hall begins to doubt his own innocence.

Between interrogations by LAPD Detective Larry McBain, Hall meets Jane Fuller, the estranged daughter of Hannon Fuller, who is busy with the shutdown of the new VR system.

Hall then romances her.

When a local bartender is murdered after he claims to have witnessed a meeting between Hall and Fuller on the night Fuller was murdered, Hall is arrested.

He is released when Jane gives him an alibi.

With the assistance of his associate Jason Whitney, Hall attempts to find a message that Fuller left for him inside the simulation.

Entering the virtual reality, Hall becomes a bank clerk named John Ferguson.

Fuller left the message with a bartender named Jerry Ashton, who read the message and discovered he is an artificial creation.

Earlier, Ashton notices that Ferguson switched places with Hall in the men’s restroom of the hotel where Ashton works, and began to realize that something was wrong.

Frightened and angry, Ashton tries to kill Hall.

Hall barely survives to escape the VR.

McBain informs Hall that Jane does not exist, as Fuller never had a daughter.

Hall tracks her down only to discover her double, Natasha Molinaro, working as a grocery store clerk, but Molinaro does not recognize Hall.

This leads Hall to perform an experiment outside the VR system, something that Fuller’s message instructed him to try:

Drive to a place where he never would have considered going otherwise.

He does so.

He discovers a point beyond which the world becomes a crude wireframe model.

Hall grasps the revelation behind Fuller’s message:

1999 Los Angeles is itself a simulation.

Jane Fuller explains the truth to Hall:

His world is one of thousands of virtual worlds, but it is the only one in which one of the occupants has developed a virtual world of their own.

Jane Fuller lives in the real world outside the simulation in the 1990s.

After Fuller’s death, she entered the virtual version to assume the guise of Fuller’s daughter, gain control of the company, and shut down the simulated 1937 reality, a plan foiled by Hall being made the company heir.

The virtual Hall is modeled after David, Jane’s real-world husband, though Jane has since fallen in love with Hall.

David committed the murders via Hall’s body, being driven to increasingly jealous and psychopathic behavior from prolonged use of VR to live out his dark fantasies.

Whitney enters the 1937 simulation, as Ashton, who has kidnapped Ferguson and bound him in the trunk of his car.

When Whitney is killed in a car crash inside the 1937 simulation, Ashton’s consciousness takes control of Whitney’s body in the 1990s simulation and takes Hall hostage.

Hall tells Ashton that he is not in the real world, and that they are both products of a VR simulation.

Hall takes Ashton to the place where he was ‘born‘:

A computer lab.

David assumes control of Hall again to kill Ashton and then attempts to rape and murder Jane.

Jane is rescued by Detective McBain, who shoots and kills David.

McBain at this point has realized the nature of his own reality, and jokingly asks Jane:

“So, is somebody going to unplug me now?”

She answers “No“, so McBain follows with the request:

“Look, do me a favor, when you get back to wherever it is you come from, just leave us the hell alone down here, okay?“

David’s death as Hall in the 1990s simulation allows Hall’s consciousness to take control of David’s body in the real world.

He wakes in 2024, connected to a VR system.

He disconnects the system and finds Jane and her father, the real Hannon Fuller.

Jane wants to tell Hall all about the simulation, and just as she begins, the film ends.

The screen image collapses to a thin line of light before going dark, like a computer monitor being turned off.

• Cube is a 1997 Canadian science fiction horror-thriller film about individuals trapped in a bizarre and deadly labyrinth of cube-shaped rooms.

Cube gained notoriety and a cult following for its surreal and Kafkaesque setting in industrial, cube-shaped rooms.

A man named Alderson awakens in a room which has hatches on each wall and floor, each leading to other rooms. He enters another room, and is killed by a trap.

Five different people all meet in another room:

The men are Quentin, Rennes and Worth.

The women are Leaven and Holloway.

Quentin warns the group that he has seen traps in some of the other rooms.

Leaven notices each hatch has plates with three sets of numbers etched into them.

Rennes tests his theory that each trap could be set by detectors by throwing his boot into a room.

This works, but he is killed by acid.

The group realizes each trap is triggered by different types of sensor.

Quentin believes each person was chosen to be there.

Leaven hypothesizes that rooms whose plates contain prime numbers are trapped.

They encounter a mentally disabled man named Kazan, whom Holloway insists be brought along.

Tension rises among the group, as well as the mystery of the maze’s purpose.

Worth admits to Quentin he was hired to design the maze’s shell, claims The Cube was created accidentally by a system, and guesses that its purpose has been forgotten and that they have only been placed inside to justify its use.

Worth’s knowledge of the exterior dimensions allows Leaven to calculate that the Cube has 17,576 rooms, plus a “bridge” room that would connect to the shell, and thus, the exit.

She realizes that the numbers may indicate each room’s coordinates.

The group travels to the edge but realize every room there is trapped.

They successfully traverse a room with a trap.

Holloway defends Kazan from Quentin’s threats.

The group reaches the edge, but can see no exit.

Holloway tries to swing over to the shell using a rope made of clothing.

The Cube shakes, causing the rope to slip.

Quentin catches it at the last second and pulls her up, but then deliberately drops her to her death, telling the others that she slipped.

Quentin picks Leaven up and carries her to a different room in her sleep, intending to abandon Kazan and Worth.

He tries to assault her, but Worth follows and attacks him.

Quentin counters savagely, then throws Worth down a hatch to a different room.

Upon landing, Worth starts laughing hysterically.

Rennes’ corpse is in the room, proving they have moved in a circle.

Quentin is horrified, but Worth realizes the room Rennes died in has now moved to the edge of the maze, meaning they haven’t gone in a circle at all.

Instead, the rooms are moving, and will eventually line up with the exit.

Leaven deduces that traps are not tagged by prime numbers, but by powers of prime numbers.

Kazan is revealed as a savant who can calculate factorizations.

Leaven and Kazan guide the group through the cube to the bridge.

Worth then traps Quentin in a hatch.

He catches up and attempts to attack them, but Worth opens a hatch under him from the room below.

All but Quentin travel to the bridge where they open the hatch, revealing a bright light.

Quentin reappears and impales Leaven with a lever.

Worth attacks Quentin, who wounds him in the struggle and pursues Kazan to the exit.

Worth grabs Quentin’s legs, keeping him trapped in the doorway.

The bridge moves, killing Quentin.

Worth crawls to Leaven to stay by her side, as Kazan wanders out into the light.

• Dark City is a 1998 neo-noir science fiction film about an amnesiac man who, finding himself suspected of murder, attempts to discover his true identity and clear his name while on the run from the police and a mysterious group known as the “Strangers“.

John Murdoch awakens in a hotel bathtub, with amnesia.

He receives a phone call from Dr. Daniel Schreber, who urges him to flee the hotel to evade a group of men who are after him.

In the room, Murdoch discovers the corpse of a ritualistically murdered woman along with a bloody knife.

He flees the scene, just as a group of pale men in trenchcoats (“the Strangers“) arrive.

Police Inspector Frank Bumstead is looking for Murdoch as a suspect while investigating murdered prostitutes, though Murdoch cannot remember killing anyone.

Following clues, Murdoch learns his name and finds out he has a wife named Emma.

When the Strangers catch up with him, he shows he has the ability to alter reality at will, which the Strangers can also do and refer to as “tuning” and he manages to escape.

Murdoch wanders the streets of the anachronistic city, where no one seems to notice the perpetual night. 

At midnight, he watches as everyone else falls asleep and the Strangers have the city physically rearrange itself and assisted by Schreber, change the inhabitants’ identities and memories.

He learns that he came from a coastal town called Shell Beach, which is familiar to everyone, though no one knows how to get there and his attempts to visit fail.

The Strangers inject a copy of the memories given to Murdoch into one of their men, Mr. Hand, hoping it will help them predict Murdoch’s movements and track him down.

Inspector Bumstead catches Murdoch, though he acknowledges that Murdoch is most likely innocent, as he has misgivings about the nature of the city.

They confront Schreber, who explains that the Strangers, which are extraterrestrials who use human corpses as their hosts, have a hive mind, and are experimenting with humans to analyze individuality in hopes of making a discovery that will help their race to survive.

Schreber also reveals that Murdoch is an anomaly who inadvertently awoke when Schreber was in the middle of imprinting his latest identity as a murderer.

Murdoch and Bumstead take Schreber and attempt to reach Shell Beach but instead end up at a poster for the town on a wall at the edge of the city.

Frustrated, Murdoch and Bumstead break through the wall, revealing outer space, just before some of the Strangers, including Mr. Hand, arrive with Emma as a hostage.

In the ensuing fight, Bumstead and one of the Strangers fall through the hole and drift out into space.

The city is shown to be a deep space habitat surrounded by a force field.

The Strangers bring Murdoch to their home beneath the city and force Schreber to imprint Murdoch with their collective memory, believing Murdoch to be the culmination of their experiments.

Schreber defies them and inserts false memories in Murdoch that artificially re-establish his childhood as years spent training and honing his tuning skills and learning about the Strangers and their machines.

Murdoch awakens and able to fully realize his powers, frees himself and battles with the Strangers, defeating their leader Mr. Book in a psychokinetic fight high above the city.

After learning from Schreber that Emma has been re-imprinted and cannot be restored, Murdoch employs his powers, amplified by the Strangers’ machine, to create a Shell Beach by flooding the area within the force field with water and forming a spit and beaches.

On his way home, Murdoch encounters a dying Mr. Hand and informs him that the Strangers searched in the wrong place — the mind — to understand humanity.

He rotates the habitat toward the star it had been turned away from and the city experiences sunlight for the first time.

Opening a door leading out of the city, Murdoch steps out to view the sunrise.

On the pier in front of him is the woman he knew as Emma, who now has new memories and a new identity as Anna.

Murdoch reintroduces himself and they walk to Shell Beach, beginning their relationship anew.

The theologian Gerard Loughlin interpreted Dark City as a retelling of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

For Loughlin, the city dwellers are prisoners who do not realize they are in a prison.

John Murdoch’s escape from the prison parallels the escape from the cave in the allegory.

He is assisted by Dr. Schreber, who explains the city’s mechanism as Socrates explains to Glaucon how the shadows in the cave are cast.

Murdoch becomes more than Glaucon:

“He is a Glaucon who comes to realize that Socrates’ tale of an upper, more real world, is itself a shadow, a forgery.” 

Murdoch defeats the Strangers, who control the inhabitants, and remakes the world based on childhood memories, illusions arranged by the Strangers.

He casts new shadows for the city inhabitants, who must trust his judgment.

Unlike Plato, Murdoch “is disabused of any hope of an outside” and becomes the demiurge for the cave, the only environment he knows.

Of the lack of background provided in the film, Loughlin said:

“The origin of the city is off-stage, unknown and unknowable.”

Above: English theologian Gerard Patrick Loughlin

The city in Dark City was described by Sarah L. Higley as a “murky, nightmarish German expressionist film noir depiction of urban repression and mechanism“.

It has a World War II-era dreariness reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s works, as well as details from different eras and architectures that are changed by the Strangers “buildings collapse as others emerge and battle with one another at the end“.

The round window of Murdoch’s hotel room is concave, like a fishbowl and is a frequently seen element throughout the city.

The inhabitants do not live at the top of the city.

The main characters’ homes are dwarfed by the bricolage of buildings.

Above: Nighthawks, Edward Hopper (1942)

The film contains motifs from Greek mythology, in which gods manipulate humans to serve a higher agenda.

Dark City director Alex Proyas said:

“I do like Greek mythology and have read a little of it, so maybe some of it has crept into the work, though I don’t completely agree with that point of view.”

Above: Australian film director Alex Proyas

• The Truman Show is a 1998 American psychological comedy drama film which depicts the story of Truman Burbank, a man who is unaware that he is living his entire life on a colossal soundstage, and that it is being filmed and broadcast as a reality television show which has a huge international following.

All of his friends and family and members of his community are paid actors whose job it is to sustain the illusion and keep Truman in the dark about the fiction he is living.

Selected at birth and legally adopted by a television studio following an unwanted pregnancy, Truman Burbank is the unsuspecting star of The Truman Show, a reality television program filmed and broadcast worldwide, 24/7, through approximately 5,000 hidden cameras.

Truman’s hometown, Seahaven Island, is set inside an enormous soundstage, which allows Christof, the show’s creator and executive producer, to control most aspects of Truman’s life, including the weather.

Truman’s world is populated by actors and crew members who serve as his community, while carefully keeping him from discovering the truth.

They also earn revenue for the show by cleverly-disguised product placement.

To prevent Truman from escaping this world, Christof orchestrated scenarios to instill thalassophobia, such as the “death” of Truman’s father in a boating disaster.

The rest of the cast reinforces Truman’s anxieties by messages about the dangers of travelling and the virtues of staying home.

Truman is intended by the producers to fall in love with and marry fellow student Meryl, but during his college years he develops feelings for Sylvia, an extra.

Sylvia sympathizes with Truman’s plight and tries to tell him his life is a fiction, but she is fired and forcibly removed from the set before she can convince him.

Truman marries Meryl, but his marriage is stilted and passionless, and he secretly continues to imagine a life with Sylvia.

He dreams of traveling to Fiji, where he was told she had moved.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Sylvia joins “Free Truman“, an activist group that calls for Truman’s liberation from what they see as a prison.

As the show approaches its 30th anniversary, Truman begins to notice unusual occurrences:

A stage light which serves as the star Sirius in the night sky falls and nearly hits him.

An isolated patch of rain falls only over him.

He accidentally overhears the crew’s radio transmissions describing his movements through town.

The reappearance of his supposedly drowned father is rushed away by crew members before Truman can confront him.

Truman suspects that the city revolves around him and begins questioning his life and asking who he sees as his closest confidants to help him solve the mystery.

Truman’s suspicions culminate in an attempt to escape the island as increasingly implausible occurrences attempt to block his path.

Eventually, he is caught and returned home under a flimsy pretext.

There he confronts Meryl and challenges the sincerity of their marriage.

Panicking, Meryl tries to change the subject by performing a product placement, causing Truman to snap and hold her at knifepoint.

In the ensuing confrontation, Meryl breaks character and is later removed from the show.

Hoping to bring Truman back to a controllable state, Christof reintroduces his father to the show under the guise of him having developed amnesia after the boating accident.

The show regains its ratings and Truman seems to return to his routines.

One night, however, Christof discovers that Truman has begun sleeping in his basement.

Disturbed by this change in behaviour, Christof sends Truman’s best friend Marlon to visit, and discovers that Truman has disappeared through a makeshift tunnel in the basement.

Christof suspends the broadcast for the first time in its history, leading to record viewing numbers.

Christof orders a citywide search for Truman and is soon forced to break the production’s day-night cycle to optimize the hunt.

Truman is found sailing away from Seahaven, having apparently conquered his fear of water.

Christof resumes the transmission and creates a violent storm in an attempt to capsize Truman’s boat.

Truman nearly drowns, but he continues to sail until his boat strikes the wall of the dome.

Horrified, Truman looks around and finds a staircase leading to an exit door.

As he contemplates leaving, Christof speaks to Truman directly in God-like fashion from the “sky“, reveals the truth about the show, and encourages him to stay — claiming that there is no more truth in the real world than his artificial one.

Truman utters his catchphrase: “In case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.”, bows to the audience, and exits.

Viewers around the world celebrate Truman’s escape.

Sylvia races to greet him.

The executive producers end the program with a shot of the open exit door, leaving Christof devastated.

After the broadcast ends, Truman’s viewers look for something else to watch.

An essay published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis analyzed Truman as:

A prototypical adolescent at the beginning of the movie, he feels trapped into a familial and social world to which he tries to conform while being unable to entirely identify with it, believing that he has no other choice (other than through the fantasy of fleeing to a far-way island).

Eventually, Truman gains sufficient awareness of his condition to “leave home” — developing a more mature and authentic identity as an adult, leaving his child-self behind and becoming a True-man.”

For the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, its official poster pays homage to the film and its final scene with their website stating that:

“Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol’s The Truman Show is a modern reflection of Plato’s cave and the decisive scene urges viewers to not only experience the border between reality and its representation but to ponder the power of fiction, between manipulation and catharsis.“

Parallels can be drawn from Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia, in which More describes an island with only one entrance and only one exit.

Only those who belonged to this island knew how to navigate their way through the treacherous openings safely and unharmed.

This situation is similar to The Truman Show because there are limited entryways into the world that Truman knows.

Truman does not belong to this Utopia into which he has been implanted.

Childhood trauma rendered him frightened of the prospect of ever leaving this small community.

Utopian models of the past tended to be full of like-minded individuals who shared much in common, comparable to More’s Utopia and real-life groups such as the Shakers and the Oneida Community. 

(The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, more commonly known as the Shakers, are a millenarian restorationist Christian sect founded in 1747 in England and then organized in the US in the 1780s.

They were initially known as “Shaking Quakers” because of their ecstatic behavior during worship services.

Espousing egalitarian ideals, women took on spiritual leadership roles alongside men.

The Shakers emigrated from England and settled in Revolutionary colonial America, with an initial settlement at Watervliet, New York (present-day Colonie), in 1774.

They practice a celibate and communal utopian lifestyle, pacifism, uniform charismatic worship, and their model of equality of the sexes, which they institutionalized in their society in the 1780s.

They are also known for their simple living, architecture, technological innovation, music and furniture.

During the mid-19th century, an Era of Manifestations resulted in a period of dances, gift drawings, and gift songs inspired by spiritual revelations.

At its peak in the mid-19th century, there were 2,000 – 4,000 Shaker believers living in 18 major communities and numerous smaller, often short-lived communities.

External and internal societal changes in the mid- and late-19th century resulted in the thinning of the Shaker community as members left or died with few converts to the faith to replace them.

By 1920, there were only 12 Shaker communities remaining in the United States.

As of 2019, there is only one active Shaker village: Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, in Maine. 

Consequently, many of the other Shaker settlements are now museums.)

Above: Oneida Commune (1850 – 1881), Oneida, New York

(The Oneida Community was a perfectionist religious communal society founded by John Humphrey Noyes and his followers in 1848 near Oneida, New York.

The community believed that Jesus had already returned in AD 70, making it possible for them to bring about Jesus’s millennial kingdom themselves, and be perfect and free of sin in this world, not just in Heaven (a belief called perfectionism).

The Oneida Community practiced communalism (in the sense of communal property and possessions), group marriage, male sexual continence, Oneida stirpiculture (a form of eugenics) and mutual criticism.

The community’s original 87 members grew to 172 by February 1850, 208 by 1852, and 306 by 1878.

There were smaller Noyesian communities in Wallingford, Connecticut and Newark, New Jersey and Putney and Cambridge, Vermont. 

The branches were closed in 1854 except for the Wallingford branch, which operated until the 1878 tornado devastated it.

The Oneida Community dissolved in 1881, converting itself to a joint-stock company.

This eventually became the silverware company Oneida Limited, one of the largest in the world.)

It is clear that the people in Truman’s world are like-minded in their common effort to keep him oblivious to reality.

The suburban “picket fence” appearance of the show’s set is reminiscent of the “American Dream” of the 1950s.

The “American Dream” concept in Truman’s world serves as an attempt to keep him happy and ignorant.

• Us is a 2019 psychological horror film which follows Adelaide Wilson and her family, who are attacked by a group of menacing doppelgängers, called the “Tethered“.

In 1986, Adelaide Thomas wanders away from her parents at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and enters a funhouse, where she encounters Red, a doppelgänger of herself, in the House of Mirrors.

Following the encounter, she suddenly stops speaking and withdraws from her family.

33 years later, Adelaide reluctantly goes on vacation with her husband, Gabe Wilson, and children, Zora and Jason.

They meet their friends Josh and Kitty Tyler and their twin daughters Becca and Lindsey at the beach.

On the way there, they witness paramedics taking away the bloody body of a man holding a sign identical to one Adelaide saw on the day of the doppelgänger encounter.

Jason later sees someone strangely similar to the man, standing still with his arms outstretched and hands bloodstained.

That night, Adelaide relays her story to Gabe when the lights suddenly go out.

Jason notices a family of four in the driveway, who break into the house and corner the Wilsons.

The intruders are Red and the Wilsons’ doppelgängers:

• Pluto, Jason’s pyromaniac, facially scarred double

• Umbrae, Zora’s sadistic double

• Abraham, Gabe’s animalistic double.

Red is the only double who can speak, albeit in a guttural, raspy voice.

She explains that they are called “the Tethered” as they share a soul with their counterparts, and have come to “untether” themselves.

The Wilsons are separated and terrorized by their doppelgängers.

Jason discovers that Pluto mirrors his actions.

After Gabe kills Abraham, the family escapes.

Meanwhile, the Tyler family is attacked and murdered in their home by their doppelgängers.

The Wilsons arrive and are attacked as well, but they manage to overpower and kill the Tylers’ doubles.

They turn on the news and learn that the Tethered have been murdering their equivalents across the city and subsequently joining hands to form a massive human chain similar to the one from the Hands Across America demonstration, surrounding the city to prevent anyone from entering or leaving.

The Wilsons decide to drive along the coast and escape to Mexico.

While they are leaving, Umbrae intercepts the car but Zora kills her.

Arriving at the boardwalk, the Wilsons find many townspeople slaughtered.

The road is blocked by a burning car.

Jason, realizing it is a trap set by Pluto, orders everyone out of the car.

Before Pluto can ignite the family’s car, Jason walks backwards, causing Pluto to do the same and thus walk directly into the fire.

While the Wilsons are distracted by Pluto burning to death, Red appears and snatches Jason away.

Adelaide chases Red to the funhouse where they first met and finds a secret entrance that leads to an underground facility overrun by white rabbits, where she finds Red in a classroom.

Red explains that the Tethered are duplicates created presumably by humans to control the populace.

(It’s unclear who created them, and how.)

When the experiment failed, the Tethered were abandoned underground for countless years, mindlessly mimicking the actions of their counterparts and surviving on raw rabbit meat.

After the other doppelgängers realized Red was “different” when she snapped them out of their lethargy, she spent years organizing them to escape and take vengeance by murdering their counterparts.

Red and Adelaide begin to fight, but Red evades and counters all of Adelaide’s attacks.

When Adelaide allows Red to attack, she impales Red with a fireplace poker, and then strangles her to death, breaking her neck in the process.

She rescues Jason from a locker.

Jason also rescues one of the rabbits.

As she escapes in an ambulance with her family, Adelaide reflects back to the night she first met Red.

She recalls that she herself is the Tethered doppelgänger and that Red is the original Adelaide, the doppelgänger having choked Adelaide unconscious (damaging her larynx, resulting in her hoarse voice), dragging and trapping her underground, and returning to the surface to usurp her life.

Jason looks at his mother, who simply smiles.

Meanwhile, the Tethered form a human chain stretching out of Santa Cruz to nearby cities, as helicopters fly overhead.

Critic Jim Vejvoda related the Tethered to “urban legends” and “xenophobic paranoia about the Other“, also writing they resembled the Morlocks in H. G. Wells’s 1895 novel, The Time Machine. 

Above: English writer Herbert George Wells (1866 – 1946)

Journalist Noel Ransome viewed the film as being about “the effects of classism and marginalization“, writing:

“The Tethered are effigies of this same situational classism.

They’re trapped — mentally and physically — and ignored.” 

Above: American culture writer Noel Ransome

Joel Meares of Rotten Tomatoes also noted that the Tethered, referencing the “We’re Americans” line, are representatives of the duality of American society, how some citizens can afford to live on top of the class system while others are stuck in poverty.

He also noted the title Us could mean “US“, or the United States.

“One of the central themes in Us is that we can do a good job collectively of ignoring the ramifications of privilege.

I think it’s the idea that what we feel like we deserve comes, you know, at the expense of someone else’s freedom or joy.

You know, the biggest disservice we can do as a faction with a collective privilege like the United States is to presume that we deserve it, and that it isn’t luck that has us born where we’re born.

For us to have our privilege, someone suffers.

That’s where the Tethered connection, I think, resonates the most, is that those who suffer and those who prosper are two sides of the same coin.

You can never forget that.

We need to fight for the less fortunate.“

Jordan Peele

Above: American entertainer Jordan Peele

• City of Ember is a 2008 American science fantasy adventure film based on the 2003 novel The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau.

When an unspecified global catastrophe looms, an underground city known as Ember is constructed to shelter a large group of survivors.

In addition, a small metal box intended for a future generation of Emberites is timed to open after 200 years.

This box is entrusted to the Mayor of the City of Ember.

Each Mayor passes it on to their successor.

When the 7th Mayor dies suddenly, the succession is broken, and over time, the box’s significance is forgotten.

The box opens by itself at the allotted time but goes unnoticed.

Several decades later, Ember’s generator begins to fail.

Food, medicine and other necessities are in dangerously short supply.

At a rite of passage event for all graduating students of Ember City School, Mayor Cole stands before the students as their adult occupations are assigned by lottery.

Doon Harrow, the son of inventor and repairman Loris Harrow, is assigned “Messenger” while his classmate Lina Mayfleet is assigned “Pipework“.

Shortly afterwards, the two secretly exchange assignments and Doon is apprenticed to the elderly technician Sul.

At home, Lina (a descendant of the 7th Mayor) finds the opened box and enlists Doon’s help to decipher its contents.

Gradually, they learn that it contains a set of instructions and directions for an exit from the city in the pipeworks.

Later, after evading a gigantic star-nosed mole, they also discover that Mayor Cole has been hoarding canned food in a secret vault for his own benefit while the people go hungry.

When Lina attempts to report this, the Mayor captures her and tries to steal the box, but she escapes during a blackout.

Now fugitives from the Mayor’s police, Lina and Doon, accompanied by Lina’s little sister Poppy, use the instructions and assistance from Sul to flee the city via a subterranean river.

When the repercussions of their actions trigger a panic in Ember, the Mayor locks himself in his vault, only to be devoured by the giant mole.

Doon, Lina, and Poppy eventually reach the Earth’s surface where they witness a sunrise for the first time.

They also locate Ember in a hole in the ground, too far for them to call to anyone.

Before they explore, they drop a letter with information on how to get out and tie it to a rock that is found by Loris.

• 1899 is a multilingual German period mystery-science fiction television series.

Set in 1899, the series follows a group of European emigrants travelling from Southampton, UK on a steamship named Kerberos to start new lives in New York City.

On 19 October 1899, the steamship Kerberos is sailing from England to New York City.

Four months earlier, its sister ship Prometheus disappeared without a trace on the same route.

Maura and many of the first-class passengers on Kerberos are in the dining room when third-class passenger Krester bursts in pleading for a doctor.

Krester is thrown out by Franz, but Maura follows Krester down into third-class, where she resolves Tove’s tangled umbilical cord.

Lucien and Clémence struggle with intimacy.

Maura has strange visions.

She encounters the captain of the Kerberos, Eyk, who warns her to follow the ship’s rules.

After receiving a message consisting of only a set of coordinates, presumably from the Prometheus, Eyk changes course of the Kerberos to those coordinates, to the chagrin of many passengers. 

Kerberos sights the Prometheus, which appears to be abandoned.

Eyk boards Prometheus with Maura, Ramiro, Olek and Jérôme.

Ángel takes an interest in Krester.

A mysterious man boards Kerberos and moves into the room next to Maura’s.

On Prometheus, Eyk finds a strange hairband, and discovers that the telegraph is destroyed.

Maura follows a scarab beetle to a cabinet and opens it to find a boy, who hands her a mysterious black tetrahedron.

Eyk receives a message from the shipping company reading only two words: “Sink ship“.

Maura houses the boy, the only person discovered on Prometheus, in her room.

She discovers a ring in his possession, and a symbol of an upside-down triangle with a horizontal line behind his left ear.

The mysterious man introduces himself to Maura as Daniel.

Ángel gives Krester a cigarette tin.

Jérôme breaks into Lucien and Clémence’s room and leaves a Legion of Honour medal.

Eyk has hallucinations of his wife and daughters, who died in a house fire some years ago.

One of his daughters wears the same hairband found on Prometheus.

He wakes up to find a shaft has appeared under the bed in his room.

Tove finds the cigarette tin and angrily returns it to Ángel.

Ángel and Ramiro have an argument which leads to them having sex.

Jérôme is discovered to be a stowaway and subdued.

Maura shows the boy a letter bearing the same triangle symbol which led her to board the ship, but he remains mute.

Eyk decides to tow Prometheus back to Europe, to the growing displeasure of many passengers and crew.

Eyk shows Maura a similar letter that led him to Kerberos.

He believes answers lie with the Prometheus.

Ada is found dead.

Elsewhere, someone is monitoring the ship’s occupants on screens.

Ada’s cause of death is unable to be determined.

After Kerberos runs into heavy fog, Eyk orders the ship to stop and wait until the fog clears.

Eyk shows Maura the hairband and the shaft in his room.

The two head back to Prometheus to find its logbook.

First mate, Sebastian uncovers a panel and inputs a sequence made of triangles.

While hiding from her mother after an argument about her training to be a geisha, Ling Yi has flashbacks of her friend’s accidental death which led to her boarding Kerberos.

Olek finds Ling Yi and comforts her.

Disobeying Eyk’s orders to keep Ada’s death secret, Franz lets Tove retrieve her body.

Krester gives Ángel a handjob.

Daniel enters Maura’s room and meets with the boy.

On the Prometheus, Eyk and Maura find another shaft bearing the triangle symbol, which is also the ship company’s logo.

More bodies are found on the Kerberos.

Eyk finds a document in Prometheus‘s furnaces which he hides from Maura.

Ling Yi entertains Lucien, though he has a seizure after an interruption by Clémence earlier prevented him from taking medication.

Furious with Eyk’s decision to return to Europe and hide Ada’s death, Franz arms the third-class passengers and urges them to launch a mutiny.

Olek attempts to warn Eyk but is beaten and locked up with Jérôme.

Ramiro warns Eyk, but both are arrested by mutineers led by Tove.

Daniel uses a device resembling a sliding puzzle to teleport the Kerberos.

The mutineers sail the Kerberos westward.

Franz forces Jérôme and Olek to throw the bodies overboard.

Sebastian convinces Iben the boy is to blame for the deaths.

She takes command of the mutineers and orders a search.

Lucien finds the medal and attacks Clémence, only to apologize and leave.

Eyk and Ramiro escape captivity.

Iben leads a search of Maura’s room, but the boy has disappeared.

Maura discovers a shaft appearing under her bed with the boy hiding in it.

The boy uses a beetle to lead Maura to a safe path across the ship.

Olek stages a distraction, allowing Jérôme to escape. Krester spits in Ángel’s face in front of Iben, but she tells him she wishes God had taken him rather than Ada.

Jérôme encounters Clémence and the two find Eyk and Ramiro, later joined by Maura and the boy.

The six attempt to launch a lifeboat, but are found by the mutineers.

The boy surrenders himself, but Jérôme tries to intervene and is shot.

Jérôme has flashbacks of his time in the French Foreign Legion alongside Lucien.

When Lucien’s suggestion to desert was rejected by Jérôme, he locks Jérôme in a cell, steals the uniform of a dead officer, and leaves the medal with Jérôme.

Back on Kerberos, Eyk and Jérôme rally loyalists opposed to the mutineers.

The two sides clash, but Iben throws the boy overboard before Maura can reach him.

Eyk sounds a retreat.

He confronts Maura with the document, which lists her as a passenger on the Prometheus.

The boy reappears on the Kerberos to shocked loyalists.

Disgusted by Iben and Krester’s actions, Tove defects to the loyalists.

Frightened of the boy, the loyalists lock him in a cabinet.

Maura is shot at while trying to free him, but time suddenly freezes, and the boy leads her away.

When time resumes, a mysterious ticking noise causes most of the ship’s passengers, including Yuk Je and Krester, to enter a marching trance and throw themselves overboard.

The boy writes Maura a cryptic note that “they” are listening, and whispers to her that if she wants answers, she needs to “ask the Creator“.

Using a beetle to reveal a passage in the shaft, the boy takes Maura to an abandoned mental asylum.

Daniel follows and promises the boy “he” wouldn’t find him.

The Kerberos receives a second “sink ship” message.

Exploring the asylum, Maura encounters Henry.

She asks him about her long-lost brother, Ciaran, but is injected with a black substance and wakes up again on the Kerberos.

Maura tells Eyk that her father is the owner of the ship company.

She uses the beetle to open a passage in the shaft in Eyk’s room, which lead them to Eyk’s burned house.

Daniel disables the ticking.

The survivors regroup.

The survivors head to different tasks:

Maura and Eyk look for the boy.

Ramiro and Anker stay in the bridge with Sebastian.

Ángel, Jérôme, Lucien, Olek, Ling Yi, and Franz head to the engine room to restart the engine.

Virginia, Clémence, Tove and Iben search for survivors.

A black metallic substance begins to appear and grow in the ship.

Tove experiences hallucinations of Krester and Ada, and has flashbacks of her rape by a feudal lord due to Krester’s relationship with the lord’s son, and her killing the lord.

Olek and Ling Yi share their first kiss.

Maura and Eyk return to the asylum.

They find the walls appear to be the ship’s hull.

Virginia touches the substance and it spreads through her hand.

Sebastian teleports off the ship and meets with Henry, who tells him to find the boy.

The engine is restarted.

Daniel follows Maura and Eyk.

Eyk and Daniel fight.

Daniel teleports him away with the device.

Daniel tells Maura they were married 12 years ago and that nothing in their world is real.

Maura locks him in a room and takes the device.

Eyk wakes to find himself on the Prometheus, surrounded by a sea of similarly abandoned ships.

The Kerberos sails into a storm.

The survivors in the bridge head to the engine room for help.

Halfway, Iben refuses to follow the rest of the survivors.

Anker stays with her.

Olek and Ling Yi head to the bridge to steer the ship.

Franz and Tove move to seal the bulkheads.

Daniel breaks down a wall and climbs through a series of portals in different landscapes.

Maura climbs through the shaft in Daniel’s room and finds herself in an abandoned house.

She sees flashbacks of her with Daniel and finds photographs of the two of them with the boy.

Daniel finds the boy and pledges to restore Maura’s memory so she can “end this loop once and for all“.

The boy gives him a wedding ring.

Daniel finds Maura and tells her that the boy is their son, named Elliot.

He also tells her that they are in a simulation and that she needs to find the override.

Maura takes out a key from her locket.

Lucien collapses from a seizure.

Clémence and Jérôme try to get him to his medicine, but Lucien dies before it can be administered.

Ling Yi sees a vision of Yuk Je and runs out.

Olek saves her, but is swept overboard by a wave.

Ángel is hit by falling debris and dies in Ramiro’s arms.

Franz sacrifices himself to save Tove.

Iben and Anker drown together.

Sebastian brings Elliot to Henry.

Henry demands the key from Maura over an intercom in exchange for her son.

The simulation ends and the Kerberos is transported to the sea of ships, where the passengers find Eyk.

Maura, Eyk, Jérôme, Clémence, Ramiro, Tove, Ling Yi and Virginia realize they all received a letter which led to them boarding the Kerberos.

Maura tells them they are in a simulation orchestrated by her father, but all except Eyk distrust her and leave.

Maura takes Eyk through the shaft in Daniel’s room to his memories of their family.

Maura and Eyk break down a wall and enter a series of portals.

Henry injects Elliot with a white substance, unlocking a memory in which Maura injects Elliot with a black substance despite Daniel telling her to “let him go“.

Daniel hacks into the simulation, changing the code and causing many disruptions.

The rest of the survivors escape from the rapidly expanding black substance in the ship, teleporting into each other’s backgrounds before ending up back on the ship.

Maura and Eyk run into Sebastian at the asylum.

Sebastian uses a device to incapacitate Eyk, then take Maura to Henry and hands him the key.

Henry tells Maura she is the Creator.

Henry uses the key with the tetrahedron, but Daniel has made them useless.

The simulation ends.

Maura is reunited with Daniel, who tells her that Ciaran took over the program.

Daniel gives her the means to leave, telling her he will “always be there“.

Maura wakes up alone in a starship called Prometheus, surrounded by many others that were on the Kerberos, placed under suspended animation.

On a computer terminal, she sees the date is 19 October 2099.

She receives a message from Ciaran welcoming her to reality.

• The Cave by José Saramago culminates in the discovery of Plato’s Cave underneath the center, “an immense complex fusing the functions of an office tower, a shopping mall and a condominium“.

The story concerns an elderly potter named Cipriano Algor, his daughter Marta, and his son-in-law Marçal.

One day, the Center, literally the center of commerce in the story, cancels its order for Cipriano’s pottery, leaving the elderly potter’s future in doubt.

He and Marta decide to try their hand at making clay figurines and astonishingly the Center places an order for hundreds.

But just as quickly, the order is cancelled and Cipriano, his daughter, and his son-in-law have no choice but to move to the Center where Marçal works as a security guard.

Before long, the mysterious sound of digging can be heard beneath the Center.

What the family discovers will change their lives forever.

• Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) explores the themes of reality and perception explored in Plato’s allegory of the cave and Bradbury references Plato’s work in the novel.

Fahrenheit 451 is a 1953 dystopian novel which presents a future American society where books have been outlawed and “firemen” burn any that are found. 

The novel follows in the viewpoint of Guy Montag, a fireman who soon becomes disillusioned with his role of censoring literature and destroying knowledge, eventually quitting his job and committing himself to the preservation of literary and cultural writings.

Fahrenheit 451 was written by Bradbury during the Second Red Scare and the McCarthy era, inspired by the book burnings in Nazi Germany and by ideological repression in the Soviet Union.

Bradbury’s claimed motivation for writing the novel has changed multiple times.

In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury said that he wrote the book because of his concerns about the threat of burning books in the United States. 

In later years, he described the book as a commentary on how mass media reduces interest in reading literature. 

In a 1994 interview, Bradbury cited political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book, calling it “the real enemy these days” and labelling it as “thought control and freedom of speech control“.

The writing and theme within Fahrenheit 451 was explored by Bradbury in some of his previous short stories.

Between 1947 and 1948, Bradbury wrote “Bright Phoenix“, a short story about a librarian who confronts a “Chief Censor“, who burns books.

An encounter Bradbury had in 1949 with the police inspired him to write the short story “The Pedestrian” in 1951.

In “The Pedestrian“, a man going for a nighttime walk in his neighborhood is harassed and detained by the police.

In the society of “The Pedestrian“, citizens are expected to watch television as a leisurely activity, a detail that would be included in Fahrenheit 451.

Elements of both “Bright Phoenix” and “The Pedestrian” would be combined into The Fireman, a novella published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1951.

Bradbury was urged by Stanley Kauffmann, an editor at Ballantine Books, to make The Fireman into a full novel.

Bradbury finished the manuscript for Fahrenheit 451 in 1953.

The novel was published later that year.

Upon its release, Fahrenheit 451 was a critical success, albeit with notable outliers.

Shortly after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the conclusion of World War II, the United States focused its concern on the Soviet atomic bomb project and the expansion of Communism.

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), formed in 1938 to investigate American citizens and organizations suspected of having Communist ties, held hearings in 1947 to investigate alleged Communist influence in Hollywood movie-making.

(The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), popularly the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was an investigative Committee of the United States House of Representatives, created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having Communist ties.

It became a standing (permanent) Committee in 1946.

From 1969 onwards it was known as the House Committee on Internal Security.

When the House abolished the Committee in 1975, its functions were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee.

The Committee’s anti-Communist investigations are often associated with McCarthyism, although Joseph McCarthy himself (as a US Senator) had no direct involvement with the House Committee. 

McCarthy was the Chairman of the Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the US Senate, not the House.)

Above: US Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908 – 1957)

(Joseph Raymond McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican US Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death at age 48 in 1957.

Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in the United States in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread Communist subversion. 

He alleged that numerous Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers had infiltrated the United States federal government, universities, the film industry and elsewhere.

Ultimately, he was censured by the Senate in 1954 for refusing to cooperate with, and abusing members of, the Committee established to investigate whether or not he should be censured.

The term “McCarthyism“, coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy’s practices, was soon applied to similar anti-Communist activities.

Today, the term is used more broadly to mean demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents.

After three largely undistinguished years in the Senate, McCarthy rose suddenly to national fame in February 1950, when he asserted in a speech that he had a list of “members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring” who were employed in the State Department. 

In succeeding years after his 1950 speech, McCarthy made additional accusations of Communist infiltration into the State Department, the administration of President Harry S. Truman, the Voice of America, and the US Army.

He also used various charges of Communism, Communist sympathies, disloyalty, or sex crimes to attack a number of politicians and other individuals inside and outside of government. 

This included a concurrent “Lavender Scare” against suspected homosexuals.

As homosexuality was prohibited by law at the time, it was also perceived to increase a person’s risk for blackmail.

With the highly publicized Army – McCarthy hearings of 1954, and following the suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester C. Hunt that same year, McCarthy’s support and popularity faded.

(An outspoken opponent of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaign, Hunt challenged McCarthy and his Senatorial allies by championing a proposed law restricting Congressional immunity and allowing individuals to sue members of Congress for slanderous statements.

In June 1953, Hunt’s son was arrested in Washington DC, on charges of soliciting sex from an undercover male police officer.

(Homosexual acts were prohibited by law at the time.)

Some Republican Senators, including McCarthy, threatened Hunt with prosecution of his son and wide publication of the event unless he abandoned plans to run for re-election and resigned immediately, which Hunt refused to do.

His son was convicted and fined on 6 October 1953.

On 15 April 1954, Hunt announced his intention to run for re-election.

He changed his mind, however, after McCarthy renewed the threat to use his son’s arrest against him.

On 19 June 1954, Hunt shot himself at his desk in his Senate office, using a .22 caliber rifle he apparently brought from home.

He was taken to hospital, where he died a few hours later at age 61. 

The New York Times reported that he acted “in apparent despondency over his health“.)

Above: US Senator Lester Calloway Hunt (1892 – 1954)

On 2 December 1954, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy by a vote of 67 – 22, making him one of the few Senators ever to be disciplined in this fashion.

He continued to rally against Communism and socialism until his death at the age of 48.)

These hearings resulted in the blacklisting of the “Hollywood Ten“, a group of influential screenwriters and directors.

Above: The Hollywood Ten

The year that HUAC began investigating Hollywood is often considered the beginning of the Cold War (1947 – 1991), as in March 1947, the Truman Doctrine was announced.

(The Truman Doctrine is a US foreign policy that pledges American “support for democracies against authoritarian threats“. 

The Doctrine originated with the primary goal of countering the growth of the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War.

It was announced to Congress by President Truman on 12 March 1947 and further developed on 4 July 1948, when he pledged to oppose the Communist rebellions in Greece and Soviet demands from Turkey.

More generally, the Truman Doctrine implied American support for other nations threatened by Moscow.

It led to the formation of NATO in 1949.

Historians often use Truman’s speech to Congress on 12 March 1947, to date the start of the Cold War.)

Above: US President Harry S. Truman (1884 – 1972)

By about 1950, the Cold War was in full swing.

The American public’s fear of nuclear warfare and Communist influence was at a feverish level.

The government’s interference in the affairs of artists and creative types infuriated Bradbury. 

He was bitter and concerned about the workings of his government, and a late 1949 nighttime encounter with an overzealous police officer would inspire Bradbury to write “The Pedestrian“, a short story which would go on to become “The Fireman” and then Fahrenheit 451.

The rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s persecution of accused Communists, beginning in 1950, deepened Bradbury’s contempt for government overreach.

Above: American writer Ray Bradbury (1920 – 2012)

The Golden Age of Radio occurred between the early 1920s to the late 1950s, during Bradbury’s early life, while the transition to the Golden Age of Television began right around the time he started to work on the stories that would eventually lead to Fahrenheit 451.

Bradbury saw these forms of media as a threat to the reading of books, indeed as a threat to society, as he believed they could act as a distraction from important affairs.

This contempt for mass media and technology would express itself through Mildred and her friends and is an important theme in the book.

Bradbury’s lifelong passion for books began at an early age.

After he graduated from high school, his family could not afford for him to attend college, so Bradbury began spending time at the Los Angeles Public Library where he educated himself. 

As a frequent visitor to his local libraries in the 1920s and 1930s, he recalls being disappointed because they did not stock popular science fiction novels, like those of H. G. Wells, because, at the time, they were not deemed literary enough.

Between this and learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, a great impression was made on Bradbury about the vulnerability of books to censure and destruction.

Above: Depiction of the Library of Alexandria (Egypt) (285 BC – 275 CE)

Later, as a teenager, Bradbury was horrified by the Nazi book burnings and later by Joseph Stalin’s campaign of political repression, the “Great Purge“, in which writers and poets, among many others, were arrested and often executed.

Above: Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (1878 – 1953)

(The Great Purge, or the Great Terror was Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin’s campaign to consolidate power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet state.

The purges also sought to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky.

The term Great Purge was popularized by the historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror, whose title was an allusion to the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.

The purges were largely conducted by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), which functioned as the Interior Ministry and secret police of the USSR.

Starting in 1936, the NKVD under chief Genrikh Yagoda began the removal of the central party leadership, Old Bolsheviks, government officials and regional party bosses. 

Soviet politicians who opposed or criticized Stalin were removed from office and imprisoned or executed by the NKVD.

Eventually, the purges were expanded to the Red Army and military high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military. 

The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society: intelligentsia, wealthy peasants — especially those lending out money or wealth (kulaks) — and professionals. 

As the scope of the Purge widened, the omnipresent suspicion of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries began affecting civilian life.

The Purge reached its peak between September 1936 and August 1938 under the leadership of Nikolai Yezhov.

The campaigns were carried out according to the general line of the Party, often by direct orders of the Politburo headed by Stalin.

Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of various political crimes (espionage, wrecking, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups).

They were executed by shooting or sent to the Gulag labour camps.

Many died at the penal labor camps of starvation, disease, exposure and overwork.

The NKVD targeted certain ethnic minorities and Soviet citizens of Polish origin, who were subjected to forced deportation and extreme repression.

Throughout the Purge, the NKVD sought to strengthen control over civilians through fear, and frequently used imprisonment, torture, violent interrogation, and executions during its mass operations.

In 1938, Stalin reversed his stance on the purges, criticized the NKVD for carrying out mass executions, and oversaw the execution of Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, who headed the NKVD during the Purge years.

Scholars estimate the death toll for the Great Purge (1936 – 1938) to be roughly 1.2 million. 

Despite the end of the Great Purge, the widespread surveillance and atmosphere of mistrust continued for decades.)

Above: People looking for relatives among repressed in Vinnytsia – The Vinnytsia massacre was the mass execution of between 9,000 and 11,000 people in the Ukrainian town of Vinnytsia by the Soviet secret police NKVD during the Great Purge.

In a distant future, Guy Montag is a fireman employed to burn outlawed books, along with the houses they are hidden in.

One fall night while returning from work, he meets his new neighbor Clarisse McClellan, a teenage girl whose free-thinking ideals and liberating spirit cause him to question his life and perceived happiness.

Montag returns home to find that his wife Mildred has overdosed on sleeping pills.

He calls for medical attention.

Two EMTs later pump her stomach and change her blood.

After they leave to rescue another overdose victim, Montag overhears Clarisse and her family talking about their illiterate society.

Shortly afterward, Montag’s mind is bombarded with Clarisse’s subversive thoughts and the memory of Mildred’s near-death.

Over the next few days, Clarisse meets Montag each night as he walks home.

Clarisse’s simple pleasures and interests make her an outcast among her peers.

She is forced to go to therapy for her behavior.

Montag always looks forward to the meetings, but one day, Clarisse goes missing.

In the following days, while he and other firemen are ransacking the book-filled house of an old woman and drenching it in kerosene, Montag steals a book.

The woman refuses to leave her house and her books, choosing instead to light a match and burn herself alive.

Jarred by the suicide, Montag returns home and hides the book under his pillow.

Later, Montag asks Mildred if she has heard anything about Clarisse.

She reveals that Clarisse’s family moved away after Clarisse was hit by a speeding car and died four days ago.

Dismayed by her failure to mention this earlier, Montag uneasily tries to fall asleep.

Outside he suspects the presence of “the mechanical hound“, an eight-legged robotic dog-like creature that resides in the firehouse and aids the firemen in hunting book hoarders.

Montag awakens ill the next morning.

Mildred tries to care for her husband but finds herself more involved in the “parlor wall” entertainment in the living room – large televisions filling the walls.

Montag suggests he should take a break from being a fireman.

Mildred panics over the thought of losing the house and her parlor wall “family“.

Captain Beatty, Montag’s fire chief, visits Montag to see how he is doing.

Sensing his concerns, Beatty recounts the history of how books had lost their value and how the firemen were adapted for their current role: over decades, people began to embrace new media (like film and television), sports, and an ever-quickening pace of life.

Books were abridged or degraded to accommodate shorter attention spans.

At the same time, advances in technology resulted in nearly all buildings being made with fireproof materials.

Firemen preventing fires were no longer necessary.

The government then instead turned the firemen into officers of society’s peace of mind:

Instead of putting out fires, they were charged with starting them, specifically to burn books, which were condemned as sources of confusing and depressing thoughts that complicated people’s lives.

After an awkward exchange between Mildred and Montag over the book hidden under his pillow, Beatty becomes suspicious and casually adds a passing threat before leaving.

He says that if a fireman had a book, he would be asked to burn it within the following 24 hours.

If he refused, the other firemen would come and burn it for him.

The encounter leaves Montag utterly shaken.

Montag later reveals to Mildred that, over the last year, he has accumulated books that are hidden in their ceiling.

In a panic, Mildred grabs a book and rushes to throw it in the kitchen incinerator, but Montag subdues her and says they are going to read the books to see if they have value.

If they do not, he promises the books will be burned and their lives will return to normal.

Mildred refuses to go along with Montag’s plan, questioning why she or anyone else should care about books.

Montag goes on a rant about Mildred’s suicide attempt, Clarisse’s disappearance and death, the woman who burned herself, and the imminent war that goes ignored by the masses.

He suggests that perhaps the books of the past have messages that can save society from its own destruction.

Even still, Mildred remains unconvinced.

Conceding that Mildred is a lost cause, Montag will need help to understand the books.

He remembers an old man named Faber, an English professor before books were banned, whom he once met in a park.

Montag visits Faber’s home carrying a copy of the Bible, the book he stole at the woman’s house.

Once there, after multiple attempts to ask, Montag forces the scared and reluctant Faber into helping him by methodically ripping pages from the Bible.

Faber concedes and gives Montag a homemade earpiece communicator so that he can offer constant guidance.

At home, Mildred’s friends, Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Phelps, arrive to watch the “parlor walls“.

Not interested in this entertainment, Montag turns off the walls and tries to engage the women in meaningful conversation, only for them to reveal just how indifferent, ignorant and callous they truly are.

Enraged, Montag shows them a book of poetry.

This confuses the women and alarms Faber, who is listening remotely.

Mildred tries to dismiss Montag’s actions as a tradition firemen act out once a year:

They find an old book and read it as a way to make fun of how silly the past is.

Montag proceeds to recite a poem, causing Mrs. Phelps to cry.

Soon, the two women leave.

Montag hides his books in the backyard before returning to the firehouse late at night.

There, Montag hands Beatty a book to cover for the one he believes Beatty knows he stole the night before, which is tossed into the trash.

Beatty reveals that, despite his disillusionment, he was once an enthusiastic reader.

A fire alarm sounds and Beatty picks up the address from the dispatcher system.

They drive in the fire truck to the unexpected destination:

Montag’s house.

Beatty orders Montag to destroy his house with a flamethrower, rather than the more powerful “salamander” that is usually used by the fire team, and tells him that his wife and her friends reported him.

Montag watches as Mildred walks out of the house, too traumatized about losing her parlor wall ‘family‘ to even acknowledge her husband’s existence or the situation going on around her, and catches a taxi.

Montag complies, destroying the home piece by piece, but Beatty discovers his earpiece and plans to hunt down Faber.

Montag threatens Beatty with the flamethrower and, after Beatty taunts him, Montag burns Beatty alive.

As Montag tries to escape the scene, the mechanical hound attacks him, managing to inject his leg with an anesthetic.

He destroys the hound with the flamethrower and limps away.

While escaping, Montag concludes that Beatty wanted to die a long time ago, having goaded him and provided him with a weapon.

Montag runs towards Faber’s house.

En route, he crosses a road as a car attempts to run him over, but he manages to evade the vehicle, almost suffering the same fate as Clarisse and losing his knee.

Faber urges him to make his way to the countryside and contact a group of exiled book-lovers who live there.

Faber plans to leave on a bus heading to St. Louis, Missouri, where he and Montag can rendezvous later.

Meanwhile, another mechanical hound is released to track down and kill Montag, with news helicopters following it to create a public spectacle.

After wiping his scent from around the house in hopes of thwarting the hound, Montag leaves.

He escapes the manhunt by wading into a river and floating downstream, where he meets the book-lovers.

They predicted Montag’s arrival while watching the TV.

The drifters are all former intellectuals.

They have each memorized books should the day arrive that society comes to an end, with the survivors learning to embrace the literature of the past.

Wanting to contribute to the group, Montag finds that he partially memorized the Book of Ecclesiastes, discovering that the group has a special way of unlocking photographic memory.

While discussing about their learnings, Montag and the group watch helplessly as bombers fly overhead and annihilate the city with nuclear weapons:

The war has begun and ended in the same night.

While Faber would have left on the early bus, everyone else (possibly including Mildred) is killed.

Injured and dirtied, Montag and the group manage to survive the shockwave.

When the war is over, the exiles return to the city to rebuild society.

• Israeli metal band Orphaned Land‘s 2018 release Unsung Prophets & Dead Messiahs is a concept album based on the allegory.

Calling Plato an “unsung prophet“, frontman Kobi Farhi explains that the “protest album” describes how humanity embraces the darkness and that the people are afraid to break their chains and embrace the light.

Is it better to conform or, despite the danger, to “one’s own self be true“?

Are we living in The Matrix?

How can we know for sure?

How real is reality?

Is reality merely a simulation?

Are we trapped in a labyrinth of our own creation?

What is my true identity?

Is the world I perceive real or only as I choose to see it?

Are we merely players on a stage for God’s entertainment?

Are there alternate realities in which my life has turned out drastically different?

Are we trapped in a cave of our own creation?

Could this world be merely a simulation that was created a century from now?

Above: The Thinker, Auguste Rodin (1904)

The Antequera Dolmens Site was declared a World Heritage Site in 2016.

For something to be declared a World Heritage Site, it must demonstrate exceptional universal value, that is, an extraordinary importance transcending national borders and of interest to present and future generations of all humanity.

It represents a masterpiece of the human creative genius.

The Neolithic Dolmen of Menga represents one of the most important masterpiece of megalithic architecture (Atlantic tradition) based on post-and-lintel construction with an earthen covering, notable for its enormous dimensions that push the size possible in a corridor sepulcher by incorporating the unprecedented solution of intermediate pillars.

Above: Dolmen de Menga, Antequera

Likewise, the later, Chalcolithic tholos (beehive tomb) of El Romeral complements the two dolmens with its corridor and false dome of drystone masonry (Mediterranean tradition).

Above: Tholos de El Romeral, Antequera

It provides a unique testimony, or at least exceptional, on a cultural tradition or a living or dead civilization.

Both the Dolmen of Menga and the Tholos of El Romeral have anomalous orientations.

The archaeoastronomer Michael Hoskin, who studied the site, noted that, whereas the axes of almost all dolmens around the Mediterranean are oriented to a celestial feature, such as sunrise at dawn on the equinoxes (as occurs in the Dolmen of Viera), the Dolmen of Menga points to the striking nearby peak called the Peña de los Enamorados.

Above: Dolmen de Viera, Antequera

Above: Peña de los Enamorados, Antequera

This rises abruptly from the plain and contains the contemporaneous rock shelter of Matacabras, in which cave paintings are found. 

Meanwhile, the Tholos of El Romeral is oriented to the mountains of El Torcal, containing the Cave of the Bull (terrestrial orientation), as well as to the noon sun on the winter solstice (celestial orientation).

El Torcal is noted for the extensive, otherworldly karst landscape at its summit.

Above: El Torcal

In addition, the Tholos of El Romeral lies along an axis from the Dolmen of Menga to the Peña de los Enamorados.

Thus, the Dolmens of Antequera construct a unique megalithic landscape by their relationship with the surrounding natural elements.

Above: Dolmen de Menga, Antequera

It is an outstanding example of a type of building or architectural or technological ensemble or landscape which illustrates one or several significant periods of human history.

The three megalithic monuments reflect a stage of human history in which the first ceremonial monuments in Western Europe were built, according to the two major building traditions of megalithic art (lintel and beehive).

This is an unusual proposal on the List of World Heritage Sites as it is not being put forward as a mixed heritage site, in which its cultural value would be added to its natural value, but as an integration and close dialogue between the megalithic architecture and the landscape.

A phenomenon of “landscape monumentalization” has occurred here by which the natural landmarks acquire the value of monuments while the manmade constructs present the appearance of a natural landscape.

The authenticity of the megaliths is well established, with the Dolmen of Menga dating to the Neolithic and the Tholos of El Romeral to the Chalcolithic.

The structures retain high integrity, being in good condition and well maintained.

Above: Interior, Dolmen de Menga, Antequera

Our visit to the Dolmens is brief and hurried.

My wife wants to see more than Antequera as we travel en route to Grenada.

Car seats scorch.

Door metal burns.

Climate control is a wonderful privilege.

As we drive away heading east, I ask myself what, if anything, have I learned from our visit to the Dolmens.

Everything seems not quite real.

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality
Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see
I’m just a poor boy, I need no sympathy
Because I’m easy come, easy go
Little high, little low
Any way the wind blows doesn’t really matter to me.

Too late, my time has come.
Sends shivers down my spine, body’s aching all the time.
Goodbye, everybody, I’ve got to go.
Gotta leave you all behind and face the truth.
Mama, ooh (any way the wind blows)
I don’t wanna die.
I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all.

I see a little silhouetto of a man.
Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?
Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me
(Galileo) Galileo, (Galileo) Galileo, Galileo Figaro, magnifico
But I’m just a poor boy. Nobody loves me.
He’s just a poor boy from a poor family.
Spare him his life from this monstrosity.

Nothing really matters, anyone can see.
Nothing really matters.
Nothing really matters to me.

Sources

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Thomas Browne, Urn Burial

Alice Morse Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days

Google Images

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Gordon Lightfoot, “Carefree Highway“

Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Human Freedom

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

Lord Huron, “Ghost on the Shore“

Thomas More, Utopia

Plato, Phaedo

The Police, “King of Pain“

Queen, “Bohemian Rhapsody“

Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Supertramp, “The Logical Song“

Andrew Tuck (editor), The Monocle Guide to Building Better Cities

Wikipedia