In 2004, Atif Rafay was sentenced to three consecutive life terms for the brutal 1994 murders of his parents and sister in Bellevue, Washington. Lacking physical evidence, the local police worked with the RCMP to obtain a confession in British Columbia from Rafay’s best friend and alleged co-conspirator. To get it, Canadian officers used the controversial “Mr. Big” scenario — illegal in the United States, where it is considered a form of entrapment — in which undercover agents pose as high-level crooks, then prompt a target to describe his involvement in a past crime as a way of gaining trust.Rafay was an eighteen-year-old arts student at Cornell University at the time of the murders. He has always maintained his innocence.
This intense conviction of the existence of the self apart from culture is, as culture well knows, its noblest and most generous achievement. — Lionel Trilling
nce upon a time, I saw a documentary featuring black and white footage of Glenn Gould, shot soon after his first recording of The Goldberg Variations, in which he had taken such extraordinary liberties — excessive liberties, some thought — with Bach. Although by then in his mid-twenties, the pianist gave the impression of being still almost a boy, still very much the prodigy. Seated outdoors, he answered his interviewer reluctantly, as if unused to conversation. Shifting around in the chair awkwardly, as if also unaccustomed to furniture, he spoke in quick runs, punctuated with abrupt halts. But gradually enthusiasm overcame diffidence. As he warmed to his theme, he became himself: voluble, playful, precise. The nimble fingers danced his ideas for the camera; the face radiated happiness and confidence. “I’ve often thought that I would like to try my hand at being a prisoner,” he said later in the film. “I’ve never understood the preoccupation with freedom as it is reckoned in the Western world… to be incarcerated would be the perfect test of one’s inner mobility.”I had known Gould’s recordings and writings for more than a decade when I heard this declaration, but though I had been incarcerated for just as long I didn’t think I understood freedom. I felt, rather, that prison had left me bereft. If I had been changed, it was not for the better.
Perhaps Gould’s remarks were offhand, no more than callow bravado from a private genius. I should have liked to ask him what he intended with the phrase “inner mobility,” and I wonder whether he ever came to feel that he understood freedom. What remains vivid in my memory is his powerful sense of something as yet undisclosed to him of freedom, of something elusive but nevertheless essential to attain. His words reach at it. They are properly philosophical. They make a problem of freedom, so often taken for granted; and perhaps philosophy has no higher calling than to make us aware of what we take for granted, by drawing our attention to this something problematic about life that may constitute its very meaning.
I have been a prisoner almost half my life, more than long enough to know that what finds voice in Gould’s words — more than a sentiment, less than an idea — is fairy tale. Is my interest a symptom of the wish to be convinced that incarceration (to the ordinary world an object of revulsion and derision, of horror and contempt) might possess some special worth? That kind of wishful thinking happens all the time in prison, and everyone usually encourages it. Sufferers wish to be reassured that they have had more from their suffering than damage, and so prisoners addle themselves with the hope that their prisons may do more for them than ruin their lives and limit their understanding. Naturally, the world at large finds this entirely endearing: such hope obviates any need to make the expectation plausible. Though I otherwise scoff at the substance of things hoped for, do I fasten to Gould’s valorization of incarceration with the self-serving fervour with which the poor and meek might cling to Christ’s blandishments? If I do not imagine inheriting heaven or earth, am I nevertheless flattered to think that I have tested inner mobility, and understood freedom?
I hope not. Even if I thought prison could deliver such understandings, I would have to count it among the sadder bargains imaginable. There are no colder comforts than knowing precisely all that one has missed and that is forever irrecoverable. But I do not harbour even these illusions about what actual incarceration brings; nor can I pretend it offers any illuminations that are not benighted. The proper attitude toward real prisons, these disgustingly efficient contraptions for turning men into ghosts, is the one Conrad’s narrator strikes in Chance. Marlow does not ever think to try his hand at prison. It is rather a thing that leaves him sick: “sick and scared.”
I do wish I could have an improper attitude. I wish I could talk of trying my hand at prison as if it were an especially enchanting pianoforte; I wish I could belong to the world that can. But I am not so free. I can never think of prison without being sick and scared.
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ould’s words interest me not despite their fairy tale quality, but precisely because of it — because they evoke a fairy tale I loved long before I knew of prisons, and love still, even in dismal rooms and worn-out clothing, after dumb drudgery and cold nights, through solitude and disappointment. I have always loved fairy tales, those of the brothers Grimm and those grimmer than any they told, and the fairy tale that underlies what Gould said that day is perhaps the greatest of them all: the loveliest, and the grimmest.Its scheme is simple. There was once a soul in bliss. But bliss was lost, and the soul went unrecognized, even to itself. Only in and through tribulation and sorrow, on the wheel of fire at the summit of human experience, was the soul again acknowledged and recovered. The fairy tale tells us that we cannot grasp what we have until it has been lost, that only pain discovers the soul in its perfection. Only through suffering can human beings reach their ultimate potential; only by agony do they become who they are. Though I call it a fairy tale, the narrative forever verges on tragic myth: against the cliff Prometheus is bound and unbound, again and again.
The premise of this fairy tale is the idea of the durable spirit, that old and cherished faith in the indestructibility of the human soul. This belief was powerful enough to ensure that the medieval familiarity with the effects of torture is not discernible in the age’s representations of hell, in which the victims are imagined to remain lucid. As Erich Auerbach so movingly observes in Mimesis, the denizens of Dante’s Inferno are not consumed by their ghastly punishments, but become more fully the individuals they are and have been on earth. Their essential character can only be brought into ever-higher relief; eternal judgment perfects it. Though each soul is given being by God, its individuality belongs to itself and is inalterable in essence. These unique souls and their inevitable destinies, which are only figured here on earth, are fulfilled in the afterlife. In such a conception of self, only that which remains constant through carnage counts as real: the soul’s mobility is the true measure of its authenticity. So it was that the Inquisition’s torturers never feared to destroy those they tormented, for what mattered in their victims was beyond all destruction. God sends souls to suffering and damnation forever, but he thereby preserves them in their human uniqueness forever. They also serve who only stand and burn. And by its very irrevocability and the infinity of its torture, the prison of the Inferno becomes a setting against which the humanity of the damned stands out with a glory that eclipses mere divinity.
It took the Enlightenment to make this formidable story finally incredible, to recognize that human beings are not given to themselves at the moment of their conception nor on the day of their birth, but must be continually made to be: to acknowledge that the process is a construction and not a revelation. Man is not, as Rousseau thought, “born free”; a world is needed to liberate the human spirit. In one way, the idea was far from new. Epictetus had taught it emphatically: “Only the educated are free.” But it had been set aside in the era when Augustine could write of the “disease of curiosity,” and Lactantius could ask what blessing could be had from learning the source of the Nile or “some mad theory about the sky.”
