I knew a guy who would talk on and on about his hard won freedom. He told me that at a very young age he had been locked up for a crime he didn’t commit. It changed him, spending so many years inside. He started giving up on the idea of a normal life. Of freedom. He became more and more bitter, more and more angry as the days rolled by, until one day, he received a visitor. A lady, called Penelope, came to his cell, smiled and offered him freedom if he would do her one task. Penelope’s father had been locked up in the same place as our man, and she hated her father more than the night hates the dawn and the winter hates the spring. Penelope asked the prisoner to kill her father and she would then get him his freedom.
The prisoner made deliberations, in his mind, he was considering the offer. Was it just? Could he live with himself if he killed another man? The prospect of freedom caused his heart to soar and race before he remembered the price that it would cost. That sobered him. So he waited, spied Penelope’s father. He wouldn’t tell me how he did it, all he said was that he drained the life out of that man until he went cold in his bare hands. As the father died, the prisoner felt palpable excitement. Penelope would free him soon.
And so she did. The prisoner became the free man. And now the free man retells this tale to those who will listen. He will describe his stay in prison as if he were describing something right in front of his very eyes. He would recount the concrete walls, the cold iron bars of his cell, the gaunt faces of thousands of other prisoners. He would recount these things to such detail that I started to think that maybe not all of him left jail when he was set free. That even now, as he recounts the task of killing a man in cold blood, he himself looks trapped in a cage. His mind obsessed is not free. And isn’t a man an extension of his mind? Of course you can’t have one without the other and they influence one another, but in this man, I see him hunched, with downcast eyes that shift from one corner of the room to the next, and see a man who holds onto his freedom so tightly that he chokes the life out of it.
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