The first of my previous companions to grow weary of my company and to show it to me were those who in the previous winter had got me to dress myself up as a famous actress and go about in the exercise yard where there were many of the simpler prisoners and offer them my autograph, which they excitedly accepted and soon were squabbling over amongst themselves, to the lasting amusement of my companions and also to me at that time, although later it seemed to me a pointless and even slightly cruel thing to do, and I was ashamed of myself for having done it. But after I had gone through my long winter and spring of complaining and griping and fantasizing and rationalizing, and eventually had come to know myself in this matter, then I could no longer join these fellows in their play and their jokes on the other prisoners. I was forced to refuse them on several occasions, first when they came to me and invited me to join them in their attempt to trick up some of the exercise equipment in the gymnasium so that the bigger, athletic men would be likely to fall and hurt themselves when they began to exercise, and then a few weeks later when they wanted me to help them decorate the dining hall for a Mayday masquerade party. I thought both activities wrong headed, the first because it would cause unnecessary anger and possible injury and the second because the celebration of the first day of the month of May was a deliberate carry over from the days when it had not yet been thought of to worship the dead and men and women went around year after year making holidays out of seasonal and celestial cycles and changes which they foolishly associated with the patterns and needs of their own mortal lives. The amnesty associated with the solstice and applied every year to the short-term prisoners and the tried and convicted political and religious offenders willing to sue out a pardon, as they called it, was a celebration of this type. Possibly this amnesty was one of the reasons why Mayday, too, was regarded as such a significant holiday in the prison. I could not say for sure, but when I offered my reasons, as described above, for not wishing to participate in the preparations for the masquerade party associated with the holiday, I was told by one of the celebrants that soon the amnesty would be made, and then all the prisoners in his group, and here he waved his hand in a circle to indicate to me his many friends, would be gone out of prison and would be lost to one another forever. Some of them even had wives, he said to me, as if this were a sad thing, and many of them would be obliged to go back and make their residences far from one another all across the nation. Thus, he said, Mayday was an important holiday for them.
I could feel a certain sympathy for them. It was true that most of this particular group of prisoners would indeed be affected by the workings of the amnesty at the solstice, for most of them, as it turned out, had been confined for political reasons, in so far as the manner of their affection for men and their preference for the company of a man to the company of a woman were to be understood as crimes against the state. For indeed, when the continued good health of the state is economically dependent upon the family and upon sexual unions therein between a man and a woman, to withhold oneself from participating with eagerness in such a union is to undermine the very foundations of the state. Though I myself was not guilty of this particular crime, I was, however, guilty of a crime similarly identified, and for that reason I felt a special kinship with these surprisingly good-natured fellows. I say surprisingly because I knew how much they had suffered for their predilections and derelictions, and it would have been a reasonable thing for them to have been far more bitter and belligerent towards those of us who were not of their particular persuasion as regards the family or as regards copulation with women. (Many of them, in confidence, did tell me that they often had copulated with women and in fact were very fond of the company of women, even more than was I myself. I found this hard to understand. Actually, I found it hard to believe, and that is what I found hard to understand, for why should I not believe what I am told by a man I do not hold to be a liar?)
They made no particular protest to my refusal to join them in their tricking out the exercise machines, even when I volunteered my reasons for not wishing to join them, which were, as I said, because I feared it would cause unnecessary anger and possible injury. I added that the taking of one’s pleasure from any increase in the quantity of anger in this already steaming world was inattentive to the teachings of the dead, and here I showed them from The Book of Tribulations (xi, 13) that the man who cultivates anger cultivates a desert. But they heard me not, and heard not the words of the dead, and instead went laughing away from me and set about to arrange the exercise machines so that several of the machines did indeed break with malicious force as soon as they were used, and as I had predicted, this caused a significant amount of anger, which did not seem to dismay my friends in the least, and also caused one rather cruel injury to the groin of one of the men caught in a tricked-out machine, which injury did not sadden any of my friends, at least in no way that I could determine.
When a few weeks later they came back to me and tried to convince me to join them in making their decorations of the dining hall for the purposes of the masquerade party associated with Mayday, they were more persistent than before, the which persistence I credited to the fact that as a coffin-maker I was known to be a clever man with tools and certain of their plans were sufficiently elaborate that they required the aid of people who were clever with tools. So when I refused them and gave them my reasons, which I have already described and will not say over again here, they were irritated with me and fell into arguing heatedly with me, some of them, while others tried cajoling me, while yet others promised rewards and certain unnameable services in return for my help. But I resisted them all. To their arguments I responded with counterarguments, which I fortified and validated with scripture, so that before long it was clear to everyone that all they had to present on their side was merely the argument of justification by sentiment, whereas mine was the argument of justification by metaphysic, and when I had pointed this out and had reminded them of the hierarchy among forms of argument, they were silenced, though I fear they were not convinced. To those who tried cajoling me with their high spirits and jokes and the promise of hearty fellowship, urging me to go along with the group because not to do so would leave me in a solitary way, I responded that without the dead I am forever in a solitary way and with the dead I am never alone. This also was successful in silencing them, and their cajoling ceased directly, and they too went off from me, leaving only those few who were making promises of unnameable services to me in return for my helping with the decorations, which help involved the construction of a garlanded and festooned temple in the middle of the dining hall, along with some machinery and stages for certain proposed theatrical and musical productions. To these last among my former companions, I said that I had turned my attention away from the living and toward the dead and that I was therefore striving mightily not to be a man of time any longer, which meant that such sensual pleasures as they promised were meaningless to me at best and corrupting to me at worst. Therefore, said I, to offer me a meaningless pleasure is to offer me no pleasure at all. It is to offer only confusion, guilt and fretfulness, for which I would not be able to thank you, for which, in fact, I would virtually resent you. No, said I, the service shall be mine, and that service is to refuse you, so that I will not resent you. But this did not please them as I had hoped it would, and with several blatant shows of their disgust and incomprehension, they departed from me.
Another group of men with whom I fell frequently into dispute were the athletic men, most of whom were committed to violence, I admit, but who only opened themselves to its use in a principled way, in comparison with the several madmen and the dozen or so youths who saw violence more or less as a symbol for something else (rather than the more usual opposite way of regarding it). These the madmen and the flightly youths with knives and other honed bits of metal that they secreted in divers parts of their bodies and clothing, these were a type I did not dare dispute with. I confess it now, even though I know that had I then my own coffin to which I could have resorted for strength and wisdom every evening, I surely would have dared to confront these madmen and youths who are, every time they are seen, in a wild chase for anyone who would obstruct or hinder them, and the one who would do so would get mashed up by them, for it is the mashing that they love. They often chased after me to obstruct or hinder them, but I would not, despite their attempts to force me by making outrageous demands upon me. For without my coffin, no matter how elevated and rigorous my attempts to transcend the limits of my mortal structure, I was never the less in this respect, in the respect of my physical cowardice when faced by a madman, or a gang of wild-eyed youths trying to make themselves secure by committing acts of violence, still a man of time.