THE EPIGRAPH TO THIS ESSAY is certainly the most often quoted line from Alice Munro's fiction. In the mode of contrasts that characterizes her fiction, it juxtaposes mystery and ordinary life, the visible and the invisible, idealism and materialism, domesticity and wilderness, ancient past and modern present. It epitomizes what Munro's fiction does, evoking elusive emotions that cannot be seen and are not palpable, while anchoring itself in images of reality. It thus reads both as a metaphor and as a metafictional comment, one with programmatic value that anticipates her subsequent work as writing that focuses on seemingly ordinary individual lives to reveal the richness of them. The topos of the cave—the word “topos” being used here in the double sense of its Greek etymology, meaning “place,” and in its figurative sense of a rhetorical or literary formula, or “commonplace”—crops up recurrently in Munro's writing and appears to be complex. The word cave in some cases literally refers to a natural underground hollow, and in others is used as a simile, as part of a description of place, more often than not a house or another type of building. In all cases the motif has rich poetic potential, inscribing itself in the long literary and artistic tradition that relies on it to open the imagination. It leads to a broad metaphorical field, one that has undergone several developments, the cave being “one of the most powerful images, simultaneously complex, persistent and subtle,” in that it reflects “concepts of material, moral, religious, sexual, social and philosophical values,” to quote Florence Weinberg's study on the cave as metaphor. Furthermore, the cave, whether in a literal or figurative sense, but originally a natural formation, is to be considered together with the grotto, in the sense of an artificial and ornamental structure.