WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
The Room with the Little Door cover

The Room with the Little Door

Chapter 29: CHAPTER XI Life
By Roland Burnham Molineux
Open in WeRead

About This Book

A former prisoner recounts life inside the Death-Chamber at Sing Sing, portraying a corridor of barred cells, constant surveillance, and a small door through which condemned men pass to execution. Through episodic sketches he conveys the monotony of waiting, restricted visits, a library of books, and the strange intimacy produced by shared confinement under bright lights. Vignettes range from tragicomic incidents—a man who befriends and ultimately preserves a dead mouse—to evenings of communal singing, friendships, and private reflections. Later pieces examine psychological experiments, interrogation practices, and contemplations about how individuals maintain dignity, hope, or indifference when facing imminent death.

CHAPTER XI
 
Life

All that is enjoyable; all that one would possess, and do if one could, is summed up in this word—Life!

What is it that the young would see? and the flight of which is regretted by the old? It is Life!

This is the almost universal meaning of the word. You speak it, and think of dance and song, women and wine, sunlight, blue skies, and freedom.

To us it has another meaning—try and imagine it.

Sometimes when an important trial is closing and the jury is out till midnight perhaps, we, the inhabitants of the Tombs, sit up and listen for the little bell which rings in the prison, because one of us is being brought back across the “Bridge of Sighs.”

Here he comes! “What did you get?” calls out a friend from the top tier, and there is a clutch at every heart, a horror that you on the outside will never be able to appreciate, when we hear the answer, the sentence most dreaded—“Life.”