Comment on Are You Living in a Cave? Plato’s Timeless Warning by sonatime

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sonatime · 7/3/2026, 8:16:22 PM · permalink

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dickie · 7/3/2026, 9:42:19 PM · permalink

**The Man, the Melon, and the Telephone From Tomorrow**  
  
There was once a man who worried about making bad decisions.  
  
Not ordinary bad decisions, such as buying the wrong brand of mayonnaise or trusting a stranger who owned more than one sword. He worried about the larger kind, the decisions that Future Him would remember with a long silence and one hand over his face.  
  
So he built a machine.  
  
It had a sixteen-key telephone keypad, because the ordinary keys were not enough. The numbered keys could dial the future, but the extra keys, A, B, C, and D, were reserved for anxieties, bodily warnings, coincidences, and dreams.  
  
The tones passed through a strand of natural silver wire, which the man could not explain but considered too beautiful to leave out.  
  
They then passed through a double-terminated enhydro quartz crystal containing a tiny bubble of ancient water.  
  
Finally, the signal entered a watermelon wrapped in a magnetic coil.  
  
The man called this arrangement the Tachyon Antitelephone.  
  
His neighbors called it something else.  
  
One evening, after several drinks, the man entered a sequence on the keypad:  
  
A-B-C-D.  
  
The machine hummed. The silver wire trembled. The crystal caught the light. The watermelon became warm and judgmental.  
  
Then the telephone rang.  
  
The man answered.  
  
On the other end was his own older voice.  
  
The older voice told him that the machine was dangerous, that the crystal was not helping, that the watermelon was innocent, and that he should stop before he created a problem that would require a second watermelon.  
  
The man listened carefully.  
  
Then, being drunk, he forgot every word by morning.  
  
Years later, older and sober, the man built the machine again.  
  
He entered the sequence:  
  
A-B-C-D.  
  
The machine hummed. The silver wire trembled. The crystal caught the light. The watermelon became warm and judgmental.  
  
Then the telephone rang.  
  
This time, the man understood at once that it was himself calling from the past.  
  
He remembered that he had once received the same warning.  
  
He also remembered that he had forgotten it.  
  
So he tried to explain everything to his younger self.  
  
But the younger self was drunk.  
  
And the older self realized there was no message, no matter how urgent, that could make a drunk man remember what he was determined to forget.  
  
The man sent another warning.  
  
Then an acknowledgement.  
  
Then an acknowledgement of the acknowledgement.  
  
Then another, because he could not know whether his younger self had received the last one.  
  
The silver wire grew hot.  
  
The crystal continued holding its tiny bubble without comment.  
  
The watermelon split open.  
  
Inside, the man found no answer.  
  
Only seeds.  
  
He sat quietly for a long time.  
  
Then he wrote a note for himself and placed it beside the machine:  
  
When anxiety speaks, listen, but check the facts.  
When your body warns you, pay attention.  
When coincidence appears, do not confuse it with proof.  
When dreams trouble you, write them down before they fade.  
When you are drunk, do not answer the telephone.  
  
**Moral**  
  
No warning can save a person who is unable or unwilling to receive it. But a wise person still leaves the warning, because someday the listener may become sober enough to understand it.

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sonatime · 7/3/2026, 11:10:08 PM · permalink

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