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And so he compares himself at times to a gadfly, whose function it is to sting and irritate people out of their easy indifference, and force them to ask themselves what they were really driving at. Or again, he compares himself to the torpedo-fish, because he tried to give people a shock whenever they attempted to satisfy him with shallow and unreal explanations of their thoughts and actions.
When the Remora finds a turtle it presses its head tightly against it, sticks fast, and both are hauled up together Sometimes the Remora will lift a turtle weighing many pounds. Another of the Pilot's favorite yarns was about the Torpedo-Fish which makes its home in the Mediterranean Sea, and which possesses powerful electric batteries with which it paralyzes its prey.
During the nights which he had spent in them he heard close at hand the sepulchral voices of howling monkeys and the roaring of the jaguars; he saw gigantic serpents coiled like lianas on trees; he knew those slumbering forest lakes full of torpedo-fish and swarming with crocodiles; he knew under what a yoke man lives in those unexplored wildernesses in which are single leaves that exceed a man's size ten times, wildernesses swarming with blood-drinking mosquitoes, tree-leeches, and gigantic poisonous spiders.
After a cross-examination he confesses his helplessness in a famous simile: Socrates is like the torpedo-fish which benumbs all who touch it. Then the real business begins. How do we learn anything at all? Socrates says by Reminiscence, for the soul lived once in the presence of the ideal world; when it enters the flesh it loses its knowledge, but gradually regains it.
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