Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard
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Read between September 17 - September 21, 2018
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It is terrific that these prisoners have a chance to read and think about Macbeth, because what hangs over the play so much is the sense of fallen human nature and the threat of temptation that even an honorable man cannot resist: there but for the grace of God go I.
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My father’s world revolved entirely around caring for her. When she died, he moved into a small condominium and spent the next twelve years in one lonely little room surrounded by his books in boxes that he didn’t even bother to unpack. The man who had once been moved by the view from the Alps now didn’t even open the curtains to look out of the window. “Everyone just puts themselves into so many prisons,” Newton had said, and it so aptly applied to my aging parents. I worried that it would apply to me as well.
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I wanted to avoid spending my life in a prison of my own making. “People just put themselves into so many prisons,” Newton liked to say. Was fear of boats one of my prisons? Would overcoming that fear set me free?
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Because prison isn’t the great prison. Prison is being entrapped by those self-destructive ways of thinking.”
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I had to ask myself what was motivating me in my deeds, and I came face-to-face with the realization that I was fake, that I was motivated by this need to impress those around me, that none of my choices were truly my own.
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When I started reading Shakespeare, I was still in segregation; that circumstance didn’t change. But I wasn’t miserable anymore. Why? The only thing that was different was the way that I saw myself.
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Spending ten years in supermax myself taught me to recognize that Larry was right: despite having the liberty that he will never have, we all put ourselves into “so many prisons.”