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The Author's Intro |
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Letter From the Editor
A Letter to the Reader
From Plato's Garage
Dear Reader,
As I sit down to write this, I am watching my favorite childhood movie, Logan's Run, on the Turner Classics cable channel. It's the story of two good kids who decide they don't like the way their civilization works. Encapsulized in a dome, their society assigns predetermined sexual partners, operates on a strict caste system, and demands compulsory death at thirty. It's little hints like this that first tip them off that their world might not be all it's cracked up to be. Just as the male character turns thirty, setting off a blinking red light on the palm of his hand, he whisks the girl away and they escape the dome, becoming fugitive "runners" in the vast unknown. The setup of the movie is a direct cinematic quote of Plato's Simile of the Cave, with the dome standing in for the underground cavern where people are destined to languish in ignorance unless they have the curiosity to believe that there is a better world beyond the cave, and the strength to explore it.
For Logan and his running mate, what lies beyond the dome is a pitfall-laden journey to a halcyon natural haven where a wise old sage unlocks the mysteries of the universe for them, then gives them the courage to go back and recount their experiences to the rest of the dome-dwellers. For Plato, what existed beyond the cave was a hazardous realm of pure though that contained the essential values by which we navigate our way through the world -- truth, beauty, justice -- that sort of thing. Plato saw the exploration of this realm as the responsibility of a benign ruling class, but I've always put my money on Logan -- an everyday working stiff who wants to know what the wide, wide world is all about before he dies.
Of course, movies ameliorate the state of things with fantasy, and we all know there is no cuddly old oracle out there who is going to tell any of us what it's all about. Even though Plato lived in a society that was not based on the equality of all citizens (as ours supposedly is), he did see that it was up to the individual to find his own way to a secure understanding of what was beyond the cave.
Like all good parables, Plato's cave works on many levels, and we have discovered more and more barriers to greater knowledge even as we have evolved. In the last century, much of our culture has been fixated on the little personal caves that people build around themselves because the whole mess is just too scary to face. Life comes at us at odd angles through dense filters, and if trying to make sense of it doesn't drive us mad or kill us, we get by. Sometimes, psychoanalysis or various other therapies help us do this more effectively.
This was the way I was used to living, and when I started thinking about this book, it was just another way for me to get by. The title was a vague way of saying that I wanted to philosophize about cars, to look at the effect they have on our lives beyond what we perceive. As I thought about this, I propelled myself out of my personal cave and down the road to a more compellingly imagined Plato's Garage. It became a very real place to me, a peaceful zone where I could contemplate the symbiotic connection between human beings and automobiles. The essays that follow explore that connection from various angles.
They also tell the story of my attempts to break out of my own curiously constructed cave, and the journey I took when I finally succeeded. The false spirituality that can attach itself to the word journey gets my hackles up, but that's what it was -- a slow going from one place in my life to another, and dealing with the obstacles along the way. This book is both the catalyst and the result of that journey. Please read it the way you would drive (whatever that means), and join me on a road trip out of the cave.
And taking this back to Logan's Run again, just because I have a nagging desire for symmetry, isn't everybody a runner at heart?
-Rob
A. Campbell
June
6, 1999
Copyright ©
2000 Rob Campbell.
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