In the twilight that thickened in my cell I sat that first night feeling these influences sink into my soul—or rather, I felt them advancing toward me, with intent to blot out the thing that was I, the personality that was my being, without which I was not. And I was afraid, afraid as of some last obscenity. I have read those who have recommended meditation before such a grey void, so to purchase the final liquidation into the great everlastingly-flowing Nirvana. To such, a prison can be commended. Such a philosophy has never commended itself to me, to whom Life is meaningless unless it be for the production and perfection of personality; and personality is meaningless unless it be the utmost differentiation of mind, the utmost liberty of thought and action, the utmost canvassing of desire and will, without any regard to authorities and bans and interdictions, or monstrous (literally monstrous) attempts at uniformity, imperial or otherwise. And so I sat there on my stool beside my little table, feeling the first pressure of a cold enormity muffling Life at every turn, seeking to reduce me to the utter blankness that is its ideal. The prison system protects itself by a number of contrivances against the suicide of its victims; but suicide is indeed the logical outcome of the system, it is its final perfection. When personality has been so far repressed that it can make no demonstration of itself, neither by voice nor signal; when personality looks upon faces that are as expressionless as the white-washed wall and flint-strewn yard; when the mind at last echoes the blankness it meets with a blankness as fitting, and the outer world becomes forgotten, literally forgotten:—what difference is there between such a state and the final quenching of the spark of life in a body whose only value is that a soul inhabits it? The last state is simply a logical completion of the first.
Thought? I had during my life conceived of prison as a place where a man could in silence and solitude think out things. As I sat in my cell that first night in prison I knew on a sure insight (what I was later to prove) that this was all wrong. As though something spake it in my soul, I knew that thought would become sluggish and slow, and finally would not exist at all, until even the effort to recall the names and faces of friends would be relinquished as too fatiguing. I knew that; I divined it that first night instantly; and I was afraid. Some of the others told me that they wept every night; and I understood it. But when the darkness compelled me to make up my bed, I simply took off my coat and collar and boots, and rolled the blankets about me as I lay down, determined that I was going to make a fight for it.