Other essays on this theme
Essay: "Music"by Dave Gordon
If you like silence, don't come to prison! Out of all the places I've been in this world, prison is the noisiest. You've got people arguing all around you. There are guys yelling in the dayroom at the T.V. with dozens of knuckle dragging Neanderthals slamming their dominos and beating out their favorite tune on the bales. It's a noise that never ends. As I write this to you I can hear three guys yelling about the Bible, two television sets are blasting away, an electric fan is vibrating my walls and about every 15 seconds, a toilet flushes. You would think that such noise would drive a person insane. But for me, it's music to my ears. You see, out of all the tortures a man can endure, loneliness is by far the cruelest. You cannot appreciate this until you stand in a room full of people who don't give a damn if you live or die. Loneliness isn't being somewhere without people. It's being somewhere where nobody knows your name. We build our own loneliness by shutting ourselves out of other people's lives. It's in his isolation that insanity lurks. I live in a dorm with 74 other men. They all are strange, funny looking, socially unacceptable and odd smelling, but I'm one of them. Together we make a ton of noise and to me; it's just a symphony of life. The drum section is the knuckle draggers, the chorus the nonstop melody of arguments and the distant crescendos of symbols crashing in naturally our flushing toilets. So where do I fit in? It's quite simple; no symphony plays to an empty auditorium. I am the cheering crowd! Hooray for the music! |