Thursday 25 February 2021

Shawshank Time

 "There's a guy like me in every state and federal prison in America, I guess--I'm the guy who can get it for you."

You’ve seen the book, now read the movie.  It’s like they run together as an intussusception of vision into storytelling, voice over into inner voice until the two are a single work.  We can’t get away from Morgan Freeman’s wistful misery tone of folksiness as though the Tao had been found in an ancient cracker.  Wisdom oft repeated is still wise and King can steer through those profound shallows.  Demotic logoi have to be born at the right time.  Generally after being gravid for fifteen years.

“But there's really no question. It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying. “

Knowing the story means nothing, there is always more to know, for you to find out.  Elements in the novella develop different weights as duration alters under the gravity of monotony.  Red pauses over his crime, murder for insurance that killed three people:

“Bystanders said it must have been doing fifty or better when it hit the base of the Civil War statue and burst into flames.

I also hadn't planned on getting caught, but caught I was.”

The Civil War statue, a location realizing device that makes it real for the readers who know just where that is in their own town.  The dead meet the dead in a different civil war.

Red isn’t black as in the movie so he has to be given a different sort of crime.  Does it alter anything, systemically like?  I don’t think so.  A book calls on long traditions of ordinary evil where the crime is the punishment.  You have become the person that has done that thing and you will always be limited by it.

"Have I rehabilitated myself, you ask? I don't even know what that word means, at least as far as prisons and corrections go. I think it's a politician's word. It may have some other meaning, and it may be that I will have a chance to find out, but that is the future - something cons teach themselves not to think about.”

Here’s a copy of it.  It’s not hard time

shawshank

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