Video Of Me At Freedom To Read Project

Back in February (2008) I participated in Global Importune's "Freedom To Read" project at the London Public Library. I read the opening piece - "The Cell Door Closes" - written in 1937 by Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian, who was imprisoned during a stay in Spain on charges he was a spy.

The video is on the right side of the page that will open when you click on the link below. I didn't introduce myself because I didn't want to draw attention away from the piece. As a result Ed Corrigan identified me afterwards winging it, bless his heart, which is why he didn't quite have the name of the London Writers' Society on his tongue. 

View Freedom To Read Video


Arthur Koestler was born Kösztler Artúr (Hungarian names put the surname first), but buchstabiert sein name auf Deutch (spelled his name in German) when he lived and worked in Germany and used that spelling thereafter. He is often referred to as a British writer because he became a British subject in 1945.

The Cell Door Closes By Arthur Koestler

It is a unique sound. A cell door has no handle, either outside or inside. It cannot be shut except by being slammed. It is made of massive steel and concrete, about four inches thick, and every time it falls to, there is resounding crash just as though a shot has been fired. But this report dies away without an echo. Prison sounds are echo-less and bleak.

When the door has been slammed behind him for the first time, the prisoner stands in the middle of the cell and looks around. I fancy that everyone must behave in more or less the same way.

First of all he gives a fleeting look around the walls, and takes a mental inventory of all the objects in what is now to be his domain:

The iron bedstead, the washbasin, the toilet the barred window.

His next action is invariably to try to pull himself up by the iron bars of the window and look out. He fails and his suit is covered with white from the plaster on the wall against which he pressed himself. He desists but decides to practice and master the art of pulling himself up by his hands.

Indeed, he makes all sorts of laudable resolutions; he will do exercises every morning and learn a foreign language, and he simply won’t let his spirit be broken.

He dusts his suit and continues his voyage of exploration around his puny realm – five paces long by four paces broad. He tries the iron bedstead. The springs are broken, the wire mattress sags and cuts into the flesh; it’s like lying in a hammock made of steel wire. He makes a face, being determined to prove that he is full of courage and confidence. Then his gaze rests on the cell door, and he sees that an eye is glued to the spy-hole and is watching him.

The eye goggles at him glassily, its pupil unbelievably big. It is an eye without a man attached to it and for a few moments the prisoner’s heart stops beating.

The eye disappears and the prisoner takes a deep breath and presses his hand against the left side of his chest.

‘Now then,’ he says to himself encouragingly, ‘how silly to go and get so frightened. You must get used to that. After all the official’s only doing his duty by peeping in. That’s part of being in prison. But they won’t get me down; they’ll never get me down. I’ll stuff paper in the spy-hole at night…’

As a matter of fact, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t do so straight away. The idea fills him with genuine enthusiasm. For the first time he experiences that almost manic desire for activity that from now on will alternate continually – up and down in a never-ending zigzag with melancholia and depression.

Then he realizes that he has no paper with him, and his next impulse is – according to his social status – either to write or to run over to the stationer’s store at the corner. This impulse lasts only the fraction of a second. The next moment he becomes conscious for the first time of the true significance of his situation. For the first time he grasps the full reality of being behind a door which is locked from outside, grasps it in all its searing, devastating poignancy…

And this is how things are to go on – in the coming minutes, hours, days, weeks, years.

How long has he already been in the cell? He looks at his watch: exactly three minutes.

Spain, 1937 (From Dialogue with Death)