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“Then the prisoner would in every way believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts.”
-Plato, Republic
Susan stood hesitating in her bedroom doorway. Through the half open door of her wardrobe, the coral skirt of her favorite dancing dress was just visible. She had planned to go out tonight and escape from the grief that cloaked the flat, from the memories that ambushed her when she least expected them. She had thought she could see some of her friends, dress up and have a good time and forget. Yet now that the moment had come to get dressed, she didn’t know if she could bear it. There was a black dress in the wardrobe too, and she’d worn it far more recently than any dancing frock.
Susan crossed the room, picking up the brilliant red lipstick that sat on her vanity and turning it over in her hands. She set it down abruptly. It was not armor enough to protect her from the ache in her soul. She might be able to hide it from her friends—accept their consolations and turn the conversation to another topic—but she couldn’t hide from herself.
Mind made up, Susan spun and strode into her living room, collapsing onto the couch. It creaked slightly in protest. If distraction wouldn’t work, she could at least control which memories she would encounter tonight.
A small journal was buried under the magazines on her coffee table. Susan pulled it out and ran her hand over the soft golden leather. It was one of Lucy’s journals. Reading it was painful sometimes, but there was a strange, comforting kind of beauty in hearing Lucy’s thoughts and learning what had filled her days. It was almost like Lucy was sitting next to her on the hideously patterned sofa. This journal was from several years ago, back in the days when her sister was alive and their relationship yet unstrained. Susan turned back the cover and let herself drown in the memories.
The evening sky beyond the window turned from gold to dusky blue, and shadows gathered in the corners of the room. Susan reached over to turn on the reading lamp. She had no particular interest in getting up and finding dinner. She turned the page and saw that the next entry was something different. Eustace is still not much of a storyteller, Lucy began, her handwriting, as always, slightly too rushed to be elegant, but I’ve finally gotten Jill to come over and tell her version of their most recent adventure in Narnia. I have time to record it now and am determined to do my very best.
Susan pursed her lips and looked away from the journal, staring across the room. Her eyes glossed over the bookshelves and the window without really seeing them. Maybe dinner was an attractive prospect after all. References to Narnia had been scattered throughout Lucy’s journal, of course, but to read a whole account of one of their made up adventures would be a bit much. Susan could never really tell if her siblings were playing games when they talked of Narnia, and it made her uncomfortable. She had always acted as if it was a game when they mentioned it to her, but deep down, something whispered that they believed it. But surely her siblings had been rational people. They couldn’t actually believe in the stories they told. For all their childishness, they hadn’t been mad. Surely.
Susan shook herself. Now she was the one indulging in fantasies, and there was no point in speculating anymore. It wouldn’t bring them back. She could skip Jill’s story, of course, but Lucy would probably reference it again. Susan knew she had heard the tale at the time, but she doubted she remembered it well enough to understand what Lucy was going on about when she inevitably reflected on it later.
She sighed, then resolutely raised the journal again. It was an interesting story, really, in a fairy tale sort of way. Flying over oceans and talking to owls fit right in with the stories she remembered acting out. Puddleglum was unexpected, however. She was surprised that a child’s make believe world would include a character who was so set on not being dazzled by hope. It seemed like it would break the magic.
By the time the adventurous trio and their missing prince were facing the witch in her cave, Susan was starting to seriously wonder what her siblings and their over-imaginative friends had made of this. To be forced to defend the existence of reality while immersed in the fantasy (or delusion) of your own creation seemed self-defeating somehow. It was fascinating, though. Susan had never been terribly interested in philosophy, but some of her friends who had studied it at university often debated whether you could prove the existence of anything, even things you thought you knew by experience. She’d not expected anything so academic to show up here.
Finally the witch came to her last question. Was Aslan, the thing they had all been holding on to, real? Susan didn’t know what hope the adventurers thought they had. She’d heard all the arguments for Aslan before. If Jill and Eustace couldn’t believe in real things, they certainly couldn’t believe in Aslan.
Her skepticism proved justified on the next page. The witch made them doubt the existence of lions just as she had everything else. Susan prepared for a deus ex machina; clearly, there was nowhere else for the argument to go.
But then, Puddleglum spoke. Puddleglum, the grim pessimist. The man who was more likely to doubt all everyday comforts than he was to believe in a good thing just because he wanted it to be true. And he did doubt; he let the witch take his whole world for a dream… and then he still stood by it.
Susan was barely conscious of the way her grip had tightened on the journal. “Babies playing a game”—that was almost identical to what she had called them all last time her siblings tried to talk to her about Narnia. But, she wasn’t a witch. She wasn’t trying to deceive them; she was trying to make them see reality.
Was this what Peter, Edmund, and Lucy had thought they were doing? Setting out into the world to pursue goodness and the beauty that was its own kind of magic, even if they were nowhere to be found? For a second Susan wavered. What if they were right? After all, in Narnia, Aslan was real, and Puddleglum was setting out after the truth, even if he couldn’t prove it. Could Aslan’s side be real in her hollow world as well?
Reality reasserted itself a moment later. Susan let out a shaking breath, her racing heart slowing. Of course her siblings hadn’t been right. Games were all well and good, but one had to grow up eventually. Susan was the sensible one, and if she had to live in the gray, grief-covered real world, then so be it. She was an adult. She could handle it.
Or, no, she couldn’t handle it yet. If she could, she’d be out there with her friends instead of sitting at home reading Lucy’s fairy tales. But she at least wouldn’t succumb to delusion.
Susan finished the rest of Jill’s account with rather less attention and went to bed soon after. The journal had done its work—her grief was more manageable now—but no matter what she insisted to herself, she couldn’t quite silence the voice that whispered that perhaps she was the one looking at shadows and insisting they were reality.
In her dreams that night, a lion roared.