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Parting Words

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What goes through the mind of the person who chooses to go to jail rather than betray his spiritual convictions? The person who, refusing to be swept up in the militant patriotism that precedes most wars, chooses loneliness and isolation instead? It is hard enough to imagine how such a person passes the days and weeks—what of the hours and minutes?

Isn’t it conceivable that the resolve of the heart might collapse under the weight of even a single moment—a moment when all self-aggrandizing fantasies of heroism have eroded and nothing remains but the fact of confinement, plain and simple as the four walls of a prison cell. Such moments carry a weight that the days and weeks can never aspire to. It is the weight of choice, and choice is always of the moment. It is always here and now.

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