From Night Operation

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Owen Barfield's novella, Night Operation, can be described as his "Allegory of the Cave." Through its characters, he explores what it means to see, to think and to create as well as the difficulty, when we are true to ourselves, of distinguishing between the three activities:


"There are two kinds of seeing.  There is just seeing—and there is being shown."

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Words were uttered by the Gods at the start. Very well—but they have since been spoken by men, and most of them spoken very much amiss; and the things have followed them. Men call themselves 'creative' and fill a Library with books and pictures, and the world with things they have made. But in the end, for good or ill, they can only do what the gods are doing in them. It might have been otherwise if they had ever been fully born. As, who knows, perhaps they nearly were.

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We shall do whatever we find to do, whether it's big or little, not because we think it's likely to succeed but because we are bound to. I don't mean compelled. I mean bound by the shape of what we've seen and by the fact that we've seen it. We shall know the direction in which our faces are turned, because there is only one way in which a face that has looked on that could be turned. And that's all we need to know. Prospects and hope are bunk. The only reality is resolution.

We also find the three protagonists experimenting with exact sensorial imagination as it is described in this passage:

Nevertheless, as Peet pointed out, amid all variety that same particular blossom with its own particular shape could be seen recurring over and over again. He made them concentrate on one of these to begin with, until they could recognize it when they saw it in another place. 'We haven't got a name for it,' he said, 'but that doesn't matter. Perhaps it is all the better. The point is we must become able to say to ourselves, 'This is this flower and not another.' After which they went on and did the same with a few more.