That Island, That Book

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com
March, 2013

That Island, That Book

A favorite discussion topic used to be about what book someone would take with him (the “him” is gender-neutral) into exile on a deserted island.

There was always some princess of either sex (one supposes now that it would be a matter of any of the four or five genders now decreed by any given federal court who takes Psalm 82.6 to new places) who brought up the Bible, and some leveler who snarked “Yeah, well, it’s about time you read it.”

Last week the London Daily Mail published a piece about a life prisoner who is into his twentieth year of talking to six walls and who feels very sorry for himself but not for the several folks he shot for not understanding his special needs and his sensitive, artistic spirit. 

The article mentioned that the prisoner has read about the little plastic boxes that people carry around and talk to (rather like the prisoner conversing with walls) but has never seen one.  He has no computer, no telly, no movies, and no radio.  The prisoner can read about such things because he is permitted to have at one time any twenty books, newspapers, or magazines from the prison library.

This is somewhat more than the one book on that hypothetical island, and certainly more entertainment than fictional Hilts’ baseball in The Great Escape.

If you were locked into a it’s-just-you-and-the-walls cell with a tiny concrete table, concrete stool, concrete bed (with a thin, fireproof mattress), and a steel potty for 23 hours of each day, what would you read?

Maybe the real book: Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape.

When P. G. Wodehouse was imprisoned by the Nazis, he managed to take with him the complete works of Shakespeare.  He probably didn’t have to worry about his fellow prisoners borrowing the volume all the time.

Under the category “Books for Prisoners,” Amazon.com lists 21,847 results – not only is a significant percentage of this nation in prison, they seem to be more literate than the free population.

When 18-year-old Joseph Ratzinger was marched into a prisoner-of-war camp by Americans he carried a pencil and paper, and wrote poetry.

Giovanni Guareschi, an Italian officer, managed to write his thoughts on scraps of paper while in a series of German prison camps for two years, and used them as the basis of My Secret Diary, dedicated “To My Comrades Who Never Returned.”

Fr. Jean Bernard of Luxembourg was sent to Dachau with nothing, but lived to write about it in Priestblock 25487.

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, survived four different death camps and after the war wrote Man’s Search for Meaning.

Ho Chi Minh wrote poetry while in French and Chinese prisons.  Those who know both Chinese and Vietnamese tell us that his poems blend both traditions and are cultured, traditional, ironic, and precisely styled.  Thus, one of the few formalist poets after World War II was a Communist mass-murderer.

Many of St. Paul’s letters were written in a number of Roman prisons.  John Bunyan, St. Thomas More, Sir Thomas Wyatte, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Malory, Boethius, Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, Charles DeGaulle, James Clavell, Cervantes, Thoreau, Dostoyevsky, O. Henry, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Solzhenitsyn, Vonnegut, Ronald Searle – many of the world’s most famous writers were inside the wire fence, starving but thinking, thinking all the time.

If you wonder what books our sometimes shadowy government provides for prisoners at Guantanamo Naval Base at the southern tip of Cuba, America thus completing Castro’s theme of that unhappy island as one big prison camp, the Guardian (U.K.) has the answer: Harry Potter stories, Agatha Christie, the Twilight series, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Dan Brown, travel books, and Islamic books. The library hopes to expand to 20,000 volumes, which would be the envy of most grade schools in this country.

We do know that despite seques-can’t-spell-it, the remaining few workers in this nation will be required to fund $195 million (New York Times) for improvements to the prisoner compound at Guantanamo, including $750 thousand (Fox News) for a soccer field.  The approximately 166 prisoners must be mad about footer, eh?

The prison also offers cable tv (perhaps Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner is popular), which is a good idea for any entity who wants to keep people from thinking.  Television is anaesthesia.  Books and paper, though, those are dangerous.  Some of those prisoners are scribbling, and maybe one will write another The Consolation of Philosophy, but possibly one will scrawl another Mein Kampf.

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