The Thinker 133
appearances. She’ll be a free woman— she’ll have the run of the cave,
the run of the world.
But for the true thinker, that Socratic freedom will probably not
be enough. She will want more than Socrates’ joyous skepticism—
she’ll want to pass beyond the plea sure of knowing that nothing is
all that she knows. Then she will begin the thinker’s exalted task,
to develop her own version of the truth: day by day and piece by
piece. Plato was not born with The Republic on his lips. It takes time
and eff ort and no little faith and love to make such a book. But when
the thinker begins to build her mansion of Truth, life—no matter
how diffi cult externally— can become joyful. Every day she adds
something to her store of perceptions about what the true and good
and beautiful are, and how men and women might live rightly in the
world. She tears the masks off common life, but she does more than
that. She works herself gradually to the point where she can say with
Plato— You, whoever you are: there is a way you can live happily.
You can step out beyond the great majority of your woes— for they
are Self- infl icted— and by a simple discipline you can have the
best that your spirit and your mental powers have to off er.
Not everyone will listen to you, the thinker; most will not. But
those who do will be grateful to you until the ends of their lives, and
the best members of future generations will give thanks as well. You
will have opened up a door in the grimy prison wall that is conven-
tional life and allowed the most sensitive and strong to walk out into
something better. Having freed yourself, you will make others free.
The young person growing up amid fear and worry feels calmer and
somehow assured of escape. We all live, at least for some mea sure
of our lives, in the cave; the great thinker forces a gap in the wall
and lets us breathe— then the hole expands and out we pass.
The true thinker, Emerson says, must “feel all confi dence in him-
self and... defer never to the pop u lar cry. He and he only knows