Read Relation of My Imprisonment for Free Online

period of transgression! I elaborate on and attend to it here solely that the reader will know that I too have been confronted by the forces of life that would demean and destroy our faith, and I too have walked across the barren desert of my own weakness and have come to the mountains beyond, and I have at last ascended those mountains. I have endured as all men may endure, if they will but will it.
    From here my debauch, like a tropical river, broadened and deepened, until it seemed to flow irresistably into a sea of life, a tepid expanse where nothing but teeming forgetfulness and transience may exist, where the permanence of remembered death is denied a place and the singleness of mortal existence, our movement from life to death, has no meaning. For not only did I begin to curtail by an increasing amount of time the period of instruction and prayer each afternoon with my wife, so that I could squirm and roll with her on the mat in the darkened corner of my cell, but I began to vary from one day to the next the modes and positions of our interpenetration. This was, to be sure, a consequence of the regularity of our unbridled comings together, a way of avoiding contact with and recognition of our essential boredom with the act and our deep knowledge of its superfluity and utter gratuitousness, for we had long since removed ourselves from any possible rationalizations such as the begetting of new children. It may also have been the consequence of a newly released idle curiosity. (I credit this motive only to myself; I know that my wife never experienced such a loathsome provocation.) But whatever the cause, before long we were engaged in acts that could only be named beastly, in positions that could only be described as perverse or, if one were inclined toward compassion, as pathetic or, if one were maliciously detached, as comic. And we worked heatedly and furiously, as if we were about to be interrupted and publicly exposed while in the midst of our abominations.
    Which, unhappily, is what happened. One afternoon in late December, when my wife and I were feverishly engaged in copulation, from a position that in retrospect now appears grotesque but which at the time functioned on my visual sense so as to draw forward from me a great long surge of erotic attention, my new jailor, a man named Jacob Moon, suddenly appeared at my cell door, which, as was the practice with political and religious prisoners, perpetrators of what were then called crimes of conscience, lay open and unlocked. It was only at night or during a rare emergency or during the visit of some legal dignitary that the cell doors in my section of the prison were closed and locked. This relative freedom of movement was considered a privilege and, more importantly, a tacit acknowledgement of the vague and ambiguous terms of our crimes and the punishments attached thereto, for during those years both the prisoners and the authorities felt that it was to their respective group’s advantage to perpetuate for as long as possible the vagueness and ambiguity of the terms of the crimes and punishments. Now, of course, both parties have taken the opposite position, which accounts for all the recent bouts of litigation, the continuous appeals to higher courts, the rising income of attorneys, and the facts that the cell doors are locked at all times and that many other amenities, such as my coal brazier, have been eliminated. For nowadays the prisoners have come to feel that they must be either wholly free or wholly imprisoned. In previous years, however, since they had feared that the only alternative available to them was total imprisonment and that total freedom was out of the question, and since the authorities feared that total freedom was the option and that total imprisonment was out of the question, both groups had struggled to achieve the mid-point between, a compromise that, because it denied both parties’ worst fears, satisfied everyone. At present