Shawshank Sunday VI: Identity

The post will examine Aristotle's Law of Identity, Rand's extrapolation to her heroes, and Andy's redemption.

Identity encapsulates characteristics. Every man, we know, has a beating heart and thinking brain. The details, or quality, of these characteristics is specific to individual representations of an identity. All men have brains, but the brains of all men are not identical. Thus, all men have character, but the character of all men is individual.

Heraclitus once penned the famous, "Character is destiny". I will take this as a presupposition which simply predicts that cause-effect relationships determine "destiny," or at least those things which happen to an individual, the combination of things they can control and things they cannot. I will also take character to be a combination of virtues, contextualized to each individual. I will take identity to thus relate to the form of character--virtuous, unvirtuous, these will constitute the identity of the individual for my purpose here.

Ayn Rand used Aristotle's Law of Identity to build a foundation for rational self-interest. Her minor heroes (Francisco, Rearden, Dagny) exemplify this trait, but only her major heroes (Roark, Galt) display a near perfection of her Objectivism. While the former characters were at times plagued with personal flaws, doubts, emotions, fears...the latter were Rand's "Romantic Realism"--ideal characters projected onto real life situations. Rand's work has received criticism for its attempt to purvey her philosophy due to her inability to make her major heroes human, in many respects. Much like the Vulcan Spock, Galt and Roark are perfect Stoics, with Reason as their only driving force and guiding principle. These never display humanity--self-doubt, self-image issues, the need for outside approval, largely emotion in general. Although in Rand's work, the minor hero characters redeemed themselves, with the assistance of the major characters, who needed no redemption, Andy Dufresne is not depicted as a robot. He is also not perfect, or else there would be no Shawshank Redemption.

Andy was redeemed. Andy's redemption was not being freed from wrongful conviction, after all, he escaped and his name was never cleared.

In the vein of my earlier post on Andy's Stoicism, I want to argue that Andy was redeemed from the loss of his integrity. As he admitted, it took coming to prison to make him a dishonest man. He had never engaged in fraud or falsehood as a banker, but after wrongful imprisonment willingly participated in the Warden's corruption. Read the post for more detail.

The interesting thing is that Andy redeemed himself. No one else could. No one else would. Unlike Rand's minor heroes, who needed Galt/Roark (an archetype of a Savior), and unlike the uncorrupted Savior-figures of Roark and Galt, Andy both was corrupted and redeemed himself.

This is a beautiful component of the story, something that runs deep and deserves serious contemplation. King takes the unrealistic Randian hero, corrupts it, and gives it the power to redeem itself. Andy, like Spock, shows emotion and feels pain, but by the force of his will follows virtue to its logical conclusion. While Galt's identity is "The Guiltless Man", Andy's is not.

Andy feels guilt, but is compelled, of his own accord, to acheive the destiny his character has determined: redemption. Andy is "The Self-Redeeming Man". This is his character, his identity, and his destiny.
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Technorati tags: Philosophy, Andy Dufresne, Shawshank, Identity

Shawshank Sunday V: Stoicism

The character of Andy Dufresne is depicted throughout as a Stoic. Not stoic in the colloquial (and often pejorative) sense of "unemotional, apathetic, cold", although it is reported that Andy is often perceived that way. For instance, it is implied in the story that Andy is found guilty largely due to the mechanical way which he related his testimony and reflected upon his wife's murder.

Aristotle observed that passions are a part of the human psyche, but insisted that reason rule the passions. Stoics simply put this observation as one of the highest priorities of their lives. One of the more interesting notes about Stoics was their relatively low regard for their own lives. That is, Stoics sought ataraxia, or inner peace, with the same interest, but not in the same way that Epicureans did: Stoics accepted reality as grim fatalists, while Epicureans sought pleasure and withdrew from society. Seneca committed suicide, and Stoics were not averse to the practice. The life of the self is held as but a speck of dust in the wind, an ember that burns in a breeze and slowly extinguishes and grows cold. The size of the universe gave Stoics a quite humble perspective upon the importance of their own lives. Most important out of these principles, whether you were consigned to live a life of slavery, as Epictetus was, or as an emperor, as Marcus Aurellius was...your life's value depended only upon your pursuit of virtue and inner peace.

Thus we come to Andy. Andy refuses to give in to the passions on many occasions. He is not a total ascetic, but we see when he wins the beers in his contest on the roof with Hadley, he chooses not to partake of them. Andy chooses, with a beatific smile, to reflect upon the ability he maintains to bring happiness to his friends, and the freedom that one can still feel despite prison walls. This same theme resurfaces with the playing of the Marriage of Figaro (Mozart)--the cost Andy will face in terms of punishment is more than compensated for by his own hope and freedom.

In retrospect, it is tempting to claim that Andy only was able to do these things because he was tunneling out of the prison. This claim is not supported by all the facts. In the book, more so than in the movie, Andy's vindication plays a huge role in his final desperate breakout. This comes much later in the story. The idea that his innocence, believed by no one, will finally be demonstrated, is enough to drive Andy to the brink of his sanity. We see his passions surface for the first real time, here. And we see that Andy values what he identifies as "my life" enough to elicit a passionate plea to the warden to help him get a new case. The warden, with much to risk, feels much safer with Andy behind bars.

Andy's life, he has shown us over and over, was never taken from him. He never lost his hope. He never lost his reason. He was still a man, albeit one who had been deeply scarred. So what life did he fear losing? Was Andy afraid? Was he angry? Both?

What was this passion elicited for? The hope that he maintained for his integrity to be vindicated. Andy was angry at injustice. It was not his own personal misfortune, no. He could not have held the hope, the freedom, that he held if he had not let go of the pathetic embrace of bitterness long ago over his misfortune, in true Stoic style.

Andy still maintained such a degree of character that he became enraged at the depth of the injustice and lack of moral fiber within the warden. The absolute lack of integrity within the icon of authority filled Andy with righteous indignation. Some would call it pride for an innocent man to hold so deeply to his own virtue, to not let it go, despite the perception of all those around him that he already had. I call it a noble philosophy--a love of wisdom.

Everything happens for the best, and you can usually expect the worst.

This is a Stoic ideal. The Stoics learned to roll with the punches of life, and Andy embodies this principle. Andy exemplifies redemption. He tells us that he was always "straight on the outside", before he came to prison. He tells us that he was a moral man. He implies that prison may have made him an immoral man, because he assisted the warden in his corrupt practices. But Andy took these lemons, drank their bitter nectar, pissed it out back into the pitcher, and saved it for a rainy day. It was raining on the day that Andy escaped from his prison--a place he was sent to for a crime he never committed. He threw that pitcher right in the face of the warden, and Hadley, on that rainy day.

Andy's love for justice, love of good for goodness' sake...they were redeemed.

He did not release wrath. He did not do what he did out of revenge. Andy Dufresne did so as his redemption. Andy was redeemed by exposing the corruption that he never allowed into himself. Andy was redeemed because he knew his virtue was never changed, and his innocence was never taken. The only way for Andy to purge himself of Shawshank entirely was to allow the light to mercilessly uncover darkness.

Andy's condemnation came from Shawshank, and his escape was a just redemption. Illegally escaping from a wrongful imprisonment is morally virtuous--to not do so is to abandon the will to live.

Andy Dufresne was a Stoic who redeemed himself. No one else would. No one else could.
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Technorati tags:
Stoicism, Shawshank, Philosophy

Shawshank Sunday IV: Jake's Anthro

Brooks Hatlen was an important part of the redemption story of Andy Dufresne. Brooks was, in many ways, Andy's antithesis. Brooks provided for us the contrast of what is was like to lose hope. It has been said that Brooks' crow, Jake, was meant to provide symbolism and possibly even link Hatlen to "the Birdman of Alcatraz." If one only watched the movie, and did not read the book, a deeper sort of symbolism would largely be lost on them.

When Brooks receives his parole, and tries to find a way to stay at Shawshank by threatening to kill Heywood, readers of Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption will have noted the departure from the King novella. A further departure from the source is found in the part that Jake plays in this movie.

While in the novella, Brooks finds the baby crow, nurses it back to health, releases it, and we find out what happened to Jake...this does not happen in the movie.

In both movie and novella, Jake could serve as an obvious symbol of freedom after captivity. But the consequence of captivity upon Jake can only be inferred from the book form of the story. In the book, Jake is found within the prison yard after his release...dead.

This is a realistic depiction of what would likely happen to a bird which was hand-fed and raised with no knowledge of predators or how to find food. It is also a realistic depiction of what happens to men who are institutionalized to the point that they do not know how to handle freedom. Prison can take away the ability to make a decision, to independently choose action without supervision or assistance.

The role that Brooks plays, as Andy's antithesis, is to show a man who lost his hope. Brooks does not believe that it can get better for him, and is "tired of being afraid".

Where Andy is the hero and Brooks his antithesis, Red's part falls between these two characters. Red will choose whether or not to hope, whether or not to go on after his institutionalization. But his choice is inextricably linked to our hero and to Brooks. The impact of both men is apparent in Red. Those familiar with the story know that Red chooses to hope largely due to a promise made to Andy--to go find the rock that he promised Andy he would find.

Red is almost the personification of Jake, but he "belongs to" Andy while Jake belonged to Brooks. While Brooks failed to instill the values Jake needed to survive before releasing him, Andy infused his own strength, character, and hope into Red. Just as what we nurture becomes dependent on us, Red came to a place where he realized the truth of Andy's words, and he needed to see his friend:

Red: I don't think you ought to be doing this to yourself, Andy. This is just shitty pipedreams. I mean, Mexico is way the hell down there and you're in here, and that's the way it is.

Andy: Yeah, right. That's the way it is. It's down there and I'm in here. I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'...Promise me, Red. If you ever get out, find that spot. In the base of that wall, you'll find a rock that has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield. A piece of black, volcanic glass. There's something buried under it I want you to have.

Red: [after Andy's escape and his own parole] All I do anymore is think of ways to break my parole so maybe they'd send me back. Terrible thing to live in fear. Brooks Hatlen knew it. Knew it all too well. All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won't have to be afraid all the time. Only one thing stops me. A promise I made to Andy...
Get busy livin', or get busy dyin'. That's god-damn right.

Red was able to choose to live because Andy gave him something that allowed it--hope.

Jake died because Brooks, codependent, made Jake just like himself--without the ability to make it on his own.

In that way, Red is like Andy's Jake. And when Andy released Red, he flew away free and lived.
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Technorati tags:
Hope, Faith, Shawshank

Shawshank Sunday III: Psychogeolothermodynamics

Andy is depicted as an isotherm. I am usually an adiabat. Let me explain...

Long before Andy received his rock pick to shape the rocks that he was collecting from the ground of the Shawshank yard, he was an isotherm. Red commented on how Andy appeared to the others as he collected his rocks:

He had a quiet way about him, a walk and a talk that just wasn't normal around here. He strolled. like a man in a park without a care or worry. Like he had on an invisible coat that would shield him from this place.

Red narrated, after the escape:

In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison. All they found of him was a muddy set of prison clothes, a bar of soap, and an old rock hammer, damn near worn down to the nub. I used to think it would take six-hundred years to tunnel under the wall with it. Old Andy did it in less than twenty. Oh, Andy loved Geology, I guess it appealed to his meticulous nature. An ice age here, million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure and time. That's all it takes really, pressure, and time. That, and a big god-damned poster.

Prison is like a pressure cooker. And from the ideal gas law, pV = nRT, we know that when pressure is increased, if the volume of the container does not change, and if the amount of substance inside the container does not change (n), the temperature must increase.

Under pressure, I suppose we can all learn to expand our minds a bit, or give our souls room to grow. That takes some of the pressure off. Some containers expand more easily than others. But inside a prison for a crime you didn't commit, being raped by grown men, abused by officials...those things cause the mind and soul to atrophy.

So how did poor Andy not just break, like the other men? How is it he didn't meltdown? How is it he retained hope? Well, it is evident from his "invisible coat," and his insistence upon retaining hope (see Shawshank Sunday I or II), and identifying with his previous life through chess and teaching others...that Andy did not melt down. Further, the "invisible coat" he had on long before he knew he planned to escape the pressure cooker. He wanted the rock hammer to make chess pieces with, and it was fortuitous for him that the walls of his prison were old and cheap, and fortuitous for him that he was on an end unit of a cell block, and that he was a "pet prisoner" who avoided surprise inspections, and got to keep his poster up to cover his escape. He wanted the rock hammer just to keep his mind sane, in other words, but he got a lot more, and a lot of luck.

Take an airtight container with some fixed moles of gas at a given pressure, volume, and temperature. Put this container in a hydraulic press. Push the button to begin increasing pressure. Put your hand on the side of the container. It is warmer than it was before. If the container is an adiabat, it will exchange no heat with the surroundings. If the container is an isotherm, it will exchange the maximum heat with the surroundings, and reachieve the pre-work temperature.

Andy is depicted as an isotherm. I am usually an adiabat. Put us both under pressure, and we both feel the heat immediately. It is whether or not the heat dissipates that determines whether we have isotherms or adiabats.

Andy is like a scuba tank, placed into the water beside the boat, to be refilled with gas. If you don't put scuba tanks in the water to refill them, they will not exchange as much heat with the air as they would with the water. If you don't allow a container to exchange heat with the surroundings, it will be limited by the pressure it can withstand, (like a scuba tank, which has a given psi rating and gauge) and will not be able to hold as much substance as a container under the same pressure which is losing heat to the surroundings. So, tanks filled while immersed in water end up giving divers more air, and more time to dive.

Andy was put under great stress at Shawshank. He never lost hope. He never lost his identity. They never broke him.

Andy is just as susceptible to the pressure as all the other men. He is supposed to be human, as they are. The human container is of a universal material, and its contents may change in quality, but not in quantity.

Andy was able to release the heat generated from the pressure of prison. Red surmised, later on, that if things had continued as they started for Andy, working in the laundry and fighting off "The Sisters" all the time, that Andy would have eventually broken. But the warden learned of Andy's prior occupation, and put him in the library to put his gifts to use. Andy then had some lucky things going for him. But if his state of mind was not one which was open, and willing to hope, and bold, he would never have escaped. It is not enough that the luck happened. He was already an isotherm.

We are all adiabats at times, and isotherms at others. A container which is covered in Styrofoam is naturally adiabatic. A thin-walled container (or a container with a low heat capacity) immersed in a fluid is isothermal. Andy is fictional. We are not. In reality, no isothermal system can be thought of that is both well-insulated and able to exchange maximum heat. At times we need our insulation to protect us from the influences of our environment. Containers put under pressure, and with a simultaneously-raised surroundings temperature, do not last very long at all. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics tells us that heat exchange always proceeds downhill--if the container is not warmer than its environment, it needs to be insulated when put under pressure, or it will likely explode.

An interesting property of adiabats and isotherms can be seen in the density state plot versus temperature (see here)--it is the actualization of what Nernst said about the 3rd Law in 1906:

The entropy change of a system during a reversible isothermal process tends towards zero when the thermodynamic temperature of the system tends towards zero [Nernst 'principle'].

The ability to perform an adiabatic, gas compression-type process approaches zero as temperature approaches absolute zero. All processes become isothermal near 0K. Why? The 2nd Law. Heat will flow from the system outward to the surroundings when the surroundings are near 0K. It is impossible to do work upon a cylinder of gas (compress it) without raising the surroundings temperature near 0K.

Sometimes we need to prevent the surroundings from cracking us. Times of solitude and quiet, meditation and rest. Sometimes we need to get away from the high temperature of the surroundings, and insulation is the only way to protect ourselves.

Sometimes we need to remove this insulation, remove the thick walls that separate us from one another, immerse ourselves in others, and allow energy to freely exchange. If the surroundings are so damn cold, without energy, and we have some to spare...let Nernst's principle rule.
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Technorati tags:
Hope, Faith, Shawshank, Philosophy

Belated Worship

The parents were in town last week. And the sister and her boyfriend.

It was a nice week. Probably a little above average on the angst-o-meter when the subjects of politics and religion came up, but otherwise, nice.

We went to church together on Sunday. We visited the First Assembly of God in Gainesville. Really nice website. Interestingly, the AG has always been on my short list of denominations that I wonder, "do these people know how this denomination formed, and when?" The Southern Baptists are another. While the SB formed as a result of Northern Baptist churches rejecting slave-owners as potential parishoners and missionaries, the AG formed (as they outline here) as a result of the Bethel Bible College (Charles F. Parham) "speaking in tongues" renewal, and subsequent Azusa Street Mission revivals. The year of BBC was 1901. There is another AG internal article here, by J. Roswell Flower, the first secretary-treasurer of the AG (1914), entitled, "The Genesis of the Pentecostal Movement." It seems historical so far as I can tell.

The denomination (AG) is well-known for its emphasis on the "evidence" of God's "baptism of the Holy Spirit". To them, God's presence in a believer's life can be "improved" by participating in this experience, which ought to involve "speaking in tongues". Doctrinally, whether they like it or not, this divides Christians into two classes: those "baptized in the Holy Spirit", and those not. This obviously begs quite a few theological questions, which I may delve into later, but not for now.

What moved upon me during the service was not contempt for these people's experessions, emotional outpouring, and exuberance. I have participated in those things first hand. I tried, not all that long ago, to stir up some feeling of God's reality in my life with such worship. Rather than contempt, I felt a kind of sadness. Not for them, per se, but for all of us.

What I was thinking about relates to the subject of yesterday's Shawshank Sunday (just published today): hope.

There is nothing wrong at all with hope. The real problem, and what stirred up such deep sadness in me, was that so much hope is misplaced. So much of our hope is put where other people tell us it must be placed. There are only so many things we know for certain in this world, but so many uncertainties. So many things we cannot control. I am of the persuasion that placing my hope in things that I will never know until I die is like putting your money in a trust for your grandkids: it is great if you have that much to work with.

Most of us just don't have that much hope to spread around. And so why shouldn't we choose to place it in places we can see it come to fruition? Why not hope for the graduate degree that you are going to have to work your tears out for? Why not hope for the job that it might land you? If you can't place hope in your own achievements, if you can't put your expectations on positive footing in your own life, how can you put hope in your failures?

The philosophy that starts out with the basic premises:
i) man is utterly depraved, anything good about man is external (divine)
ii) man can accomplish nothing of note or of worth, everything he accomplishes is imperfect
iii) perfection is demanded by god, thus man depends wholly upon god's grace for anything, everything, and can achieve nothing without god

Leaves one with only one logical place to put their hope: in death.

To me, that is worshipping death. That is placing death itself as the horizon to which we ought to strive. Jesus minced no words when he said that to follow him meant to bear one's cross. Dying to self is the paradigm of the Christian. Buddha, Confucious, and countless others have taught the same. These take for their basic premise that death is certain, and that our life ought to mimic our death in order to truly live.

To me, my basic premise is that life is certain, though its extent is not. I read Atlas Shrugged recently, and it got me looking into Neo-Objectivism [edited note: not a Randroid, just interested in how their basic philosophy works and how they claim it justifies government-free economics and egoism]. As such, I believe that subjective metaphysics are philosophically necessary, and pragmatically healthy to a degree, but I do not believe that one's quality of life is instrinsically linked to one's take on metaphysics. What I am thinking of by "subjective metaphysics" include things like one's appreciation of art, beauty, music, literature, and even the appraisal of "value" and "purpose" in life to some degree. These are often the purview of religion, but shouldn't be because aesthetics has a rigorous philosophical background. Further, I believe that those who place subjective experience and mysticism above objective reality are doomed to misery in this life. In Rand's words,

[T]he only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim.

Ayn Rand's ideas, though shared in part or in full by so many other philosophers, are perhaps some of the closest in their articulation to my own. I do not accept all the tenets of Objectivist philosophy fundamentally. I despise all forms of close-minded fundamentalism. To close one's mind and become dogmatic is, in essence, to say, "I already know everything, and no knowledge can shake my certitude...my hubris is equivocated as faith."

I reject assertions that life's quality is linked to someone else's subjective experience, and not to my own. If I cannot reason through a set of premises and assertions, then ought I to accept them as true? Why? I reject philosophical premises which are definitively subjective as having any authority over my life. Life's quality, instead, must depend upon objective reality, as mediated by reason. Reality depends largely on your perception and largely on your effort, but most of all upon your reason. What you know to be virtual, versus what you know to be "real", is 100% dependent upon your reason, unless we are all just brains in a vat.

Fear comes when reason is pushed out. Living your life in fear is the same as living your life in death. Living in fear and living as if "dead" to one's self, to one's rational self-interest, is, I am persuaded, worshiping the unknown as the known and death as life. Placing your hope in death, and consequently living one's life in fear, thus becomes belated worship.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Fear

Shawshank Sunday II: The Danger of Hope

Red said to Andy, after Andy's release from solitary confinement,

Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.

Red had come to fear hope itself. More evidence of this is found as Andy explained to Red why he was glad he had played Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro."

Andy Dufresne: That's the beauty of music. They can't get that from you... Haven't you ever felt that way about music?
Red: I played a mean harmonica as a younger man. Lost interest in it though. Didn't make much sense in here
Andy Dufresne: Here's where it makes the most sense. You need it so you don't forget.
Red: Forget?
Andy Dufresne: Forget that... there are places in this world that aren't made out of stone, and that there's something inside that they can't get to ,and that they can't touch. It's yours.
Red: What're you talking about?
Andy Dufresne: Hope.

When Andy "flew the coop," he left behind a note for his friend. It was this note that caused Red to choose the compass over the gun later on--to choose to live and conquer his fear. Andy Dufresne wrote his friend:

"...hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies."

Idealistic of him to say that no good thing ever dies, but it is true to say that we can preserve our hope up until the moment we do. When death becomes a trapdoor to escape fear, that life is already over. Red stood before Brooks' tombstone in one of the most tense moments in the movie. We don't know if Red has the courage to face his fear. Brooks already told us, "...I'm tired of being afraid all the time," in a goodbye letter to his friends. Hope is choosing not to fear. Hope is the choice we make when we let either:

1) our reason, our minds, work out all the conditions, evaluate probabilities, and we say, "there is a chance, and the chance is enough to make me go for it..."
2) our faith alone, our belief alone, motivate us to do something which may be irrational, or not, but is definitely not thought out. Hope of this sort is what is portrayed in "Braveheart" when Robert I the Bruce decides impetuously to charge against England and he wins. This sort of hope is the idealized/mystical version, considered superlative to (1)

Red made a rational decision. He was afraid, but he didn't have to be. And to escape his fear, he didn't have to end his life. He chose not to equivocate living with dying. Too many people don't have the reason, the courage, or the desire to avoid making that mistake.

Red said, in the closing lines of the book,

"...I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope."

Too many people believe that hope is a dangerous thing. I hear it all the time. It usually manifests itself as fear of the unknown, fear of what may happen if we choose wrongly. All we know for sure is that death is going to happen. My philosophy is that we ought to live in such a way so that death takes us by surprise, and that fear (death realized within life) doesn't become our way of life.

Hope may be a dangerous thing to some, leading them to the abyss of insanity. To me, insanity begins when we assert what we do not know, and induce fear where none must exist. To me, banking what we do know (that we are alive) on what we don't know (what comes afterwards) so that the former gets swallowed up in the latter is like being swallowed into the mouth of madness.
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Technorati tags: Hope, shawshank, God

Shawshank Sunday

I've decided to run a series, every Sunday, considering literary, philosophical, and general points that can be inferred from Stephen King's The Shawshank Redemption. I read this novella when I was about 13, and it was one of my favorites...and still is to this day.

1. Shawshank Sunday I: Brooks vs. Red (11-20-2005)


2. Shawshank Sunday II: The Danger of Hope (11-27-2005)


3. Shawshank Sunday III: Psychogeolochemistry (12-4-2005)


4. Shawshank Sunday IV: Jake's Anthro (12-11-2005)


5. Shawshank Sunday V: Stoicism (1-1-2006)


6. Shawshank Sunday VI: Identity (1-15-2006)

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Technorati tags:
Shawshank, God, Religion, Philosophy

Shawshank Sunday I: Brooks vs. Red

Let's consider two of the characters from the novella--Brooks and Red:

Brooks had been imprisoned for more than 2/3 of his entire life. So had Red. Both were murderers. Both were young men as they entered prison, hard as the entered, broken as they left.

One commits suicide upon his discharge from prison, and the other barely averts it.

What made the difference? What decided Brooks' fate versus Red's? That is the thought of the day...

Both men, upon entering the big wide world after their prison discharge, find it a terribly scary place. For one thing, their "institutionalized" minds are used to structure, uniformity, and an authority to make decisions for them. The world, and its constituent freedoms, pose a daunting challenge for these men. How will they regain intellectual autonomy? Moral autonomy?

Brooks talks about wanting to commit another robbery, just so that he can go back "home". He associates the prison with safety = a known environment, a known set of standards and rules. I think we can learn something from this. People fear the unknown. This isn't a deep insight on my part, but a time-tested and proven fact of nature.

Red fears the unknown too. How does one find their way in a dark room? You have to start with some kind marker, something to identify with, something to give you direction. What makes the difference between these two men? Well...

The difference is that Red chose the compass, while Brooks chose the gun. When Red is shown (in the movie) strolling by the Pawn Shop, he stops to look in the window. He sees a gun (a way out, escape from "being afraid all the time") and he sees a compass (a symbol of retaining hope and "going for it"). Red says to himself, "hell with it, get busy livin', or get busy dyin' [symbolically]," by choosing the compass. But why?

Simple answer: there is no compass there for Brooks. Brooks hangs himself because he has no alternative. He is afraid of the unknown, and short of returning to the known, "safe" world of prison, he opts instead for choosing the known, "safe" escape from fear--death itself.

Both men came to the same place--a beam. To one man, it represented a foundation, a marker, a place to start. He writes, "Brooks was here" to show any/all who care that he wasn't just a transitory, soulless creature, but a human being. Another man (Red) sees the beam, and it represents a tombstone--his friend's eulogy.

Red had hope because Andy had hope. Brooks did not have Andy in his life. Red had a compass because Andy left him a direction (north end of the field, big oak tree...). Brooks had no place to go from that beam, and nothing to help him find his way. Andy represents a sort of Savior to Red. But Andy is no demi-god, no deity...only a man who refused to be broken as Red had. Generally, people call this sort of thing "pride," but Andy shows us that pride and sin are sometimes equivocated as "hope". That we can choose to be strong, and that we must.

Stephen King published "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" in a set of four novellas entitled, Different Seasons. This story was meant to be the "Spring" of those seasons--a time of change and hope. Red showed us that man can come to a place of fear, encircled by the unknown, and can choose to find his own way. He can stare in the face of death, in the face of fear, and not blink...but instead, smile. He could smile because he could see his friend smiling. And his friend could smile because he never let them break him.

"Brooks was here."

"Red was too."

I think there is something deep here to what King was showing us: What tombstone will we leave behind? How much hope will we spread? How do we handle fear, and the unknown? How many of us have a compass, or directions, versus a rope or a gun? We will all lose our way, at some point in our lives. What then?

How many of us read the tombstones of those gone on before? Which tombstones do we stay at a while? Which do we identify with? Does it comfort us to hold death as "the great unknown" or fill us with fear? How many of us need certainty and a homogeneous worldview?

Sum quod eris / Fui quod sis

Non sum qualis eram
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Shawshank, Philosophy