Sheon Han at Asterisk:
The long tradition of carceral creativity goes back centuries: John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy, and Oscar Wilde De Profundis all while behind bars. The lineage continued into modern times with Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and, of course, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote an entire novel on toilet paper in his prison cell.
Confinement in the military, it turns out, can also be a boon to literary output. James Salter packed a typewriter to write between flight missions, and Ludwig Wittgenstein drafted the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the trenches of World War I.
Because I’m no genius, writing philosophical treatises would be a tall order. But I figured I could at least read them. The bleak summer before enlistment felt less grim when I realized I could make it a reading retreat. Twenty-one months of service were ninety-one weeks — in my economy, six academic semesters, or three years of college.
More here.
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