Digging

First of all, this is a story about digging tunnels.

A prisoner in Shawshank Prison and a rabbit in winter were both digging for freedom.

The result was that the prisoner spent twenty-seven years digging toward the sewer, waited for his chance, and escaped successfully.

The rabbit returned to the surface after more than a month. With no water or food, it mistook cardboard for food and snow for water. Its owner found it only after the snow melted. It was finally saved, and then optimistically pestered its owner for food again.

Freedom

The idea that the rabbit was digging for freedom is something I invented. It is like saying birds do not want to be enclosed in cages, or fish do not want to stay in fish tanks. Those ideas are things people invent too.

Do fish really not want to be confined in tanks? If so, are there individual differences, just as some people prefer solitude while others prefer socializing? Perhaps fish do too: some may prefer quietly sleeping in a tank instead of worrying in the sea.

I cannot explain whether the rabbit truly longed for freedom or even understood what freedom was.

But that prisoner really did dig for freedom. The freedom here, however, is something subtler.

Let us call the prisoner K.

A scene in both the novel and the film has K help the captain of the guards arrange a $35,000 gift to his wife without tax being withheld. In exchange, K asks that each of his coworkers receive three bottles of beer.

K lets his coworkers taste freedom.

After hard work, they can drink cold beer while watching the sunset. At that moment, they feel as if they are not in prison.

This freedom has limits, but it leads toward freedom in the broader sense.

The freedom people in prison can feel is not necessarily freedom from the cage. D, the library keeper, has been institutionalized for fifty years and comes to depend completely on prison life. In prison, he is one of the few educated people, a librarian with a place of his own. Outside it, he is only a sixty-eight-year-old man with arthritis.

So making someone feel no longer in prison is a kind of freedom, or at least temporary freedom.

That not being in prison is very different from literally being outside prison. It is an imagined freedom and purity, like the imagined Tang dynasty and Chang’an in The Long Ballad: it exists, yet it is false, and also incomparably pure. At the very least, it offers spiritual satisfaction.

Hope

The second moment was created for the film. K uses the prison broadcast system to play an Italian song with a woman’s voice. When the prisoners hear it, they all feel that something is there—or that something does not belong here at all.

Perhaps that is hope.

Most prisoners serving life sentences had discarded it long ago. Yet in that moment, the music returns a little of it to them, even if they do not seem to recognize what the feeling is.

K says that the music will keep bringing him that feeling for a long time. Because music creates memory, he can recall the song and feel it again whenever he wants.

I understand it a little, but it is hard to truly experience.

Passing the time

Prison is a huge pressure vessel.

So the guards and prison leadership turn a blind eye and let prisoners have hobbies, so long as those hobbies are safe.

It is said that one man carved three statues: a baby boy, a bearded young man, and a middle-aged man. He said they represented the three stages of God.

Those three statues were apparently later displayed in the governor’s exhibition room.

Some people also earn college diplomas there.

But the people there seem to share certain traits. Every prisoner can read novels about courts and prison breaks over and over without getting tired of them, even more than pornographic novels.

Perhaps those stories contain their desire for freedom and their remaining hope, though, as usual, it is difficult to notice.

Pressure

For K, who decides to escape, the pressure is unmatched.

One day, he discovers that the concrete in the wall seems rather loose, so he begins to dig.

The pressures of digging include:

• He may have a cellmate, who could expose his secret.
• He may be transferred to another prison midway through, and being found digging there would bring a harsher punishment.
• Without prison blueprints, it is hard to know where he will dig to. There is an interesting story about a prisoner who dug into a police office, poked out his head, and was immediately caught again. I do not know whether it is true.
• If he is granted parole midway through and the tunnel is discovered when his cell is cleared out, he will end up back in prison.
• He cannot know how long he will need to keep digging: ten years, twenty years, or fifty. In reality, it takes him twenty-seven.
• Being caught after successfully digging the tunnel would be even worse. Many people escape prison; very few succeed.

If I faced these pressures, I would collapse. I would be unable to think normally, wear a strange expression, and worry all day.

That is why K’s self-control is what stays with me most from the whole book.

One comment says that K reveals what benefits him only a little at a time, while saying nothing at all about what would hurt him. He drinks only four times a year: twice on his birthday, then at Christmas and Lunar New Year’s Eve.

I have very little self-control, and perhaps that is why it matters so much to me.

Escape

This also seems to be the title of a short-story collection.

I seem especially drawn to this kind of subject. Is it because I too feel trapped in a cage?

How can my hope and freedom draw nearer?