The title comes from an elegiac poem by W.H. Auden. The painting is a testament to my father's artistic struggles and mental breakdown. The cave actually exists in Teotihuacan, Mexico, near the Aztec Pyramids and the Avenue of the Dead. It is also an allusion to Plato's Cave. Set out is the dilemma between flesh and the spirit, figuration and abstraction, as my father understood it. Improvisations on the early Modernist languages of Klee, Kandinsky and Malevich my father's wrestling with the idea of " Depth perception in Nature and depth creation on the picture surface... the crucial problem in pictorial creation."— Hans Hoffmann.