In this short reflection, Younker tells of the torturous experience of solitary confinement and the impact it has on the human mind and body.

Hope…is the worst of evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.

– F. Nietzsche

No hope, indeed. Mr. Nietzsche must have been doing a stint in solitary when he chiseled out that bleak line. Every poor soul who’s endured a little time in “The Hole” can tell you, in a hundred words or less, just what total isolation can do to the human mind. And let me tell you, folks, the results are often disastrous. Some people say it even withers the soul.

Which may be true.

But the rigors of solitary confinement are nothing new. Anybody who’s ever stumbled through a class in criminal justice might recall the grim statistics. Studies show that a number of people suffer irretrievable damage. Modern day professionals even deem these practices to be torturous, traumatizing. After a few mind-bending weeks in the tank, even formidable men start to get squirrely.

And I was one of them.

Boredom is a hard thing to cope with for most people, but couple the loneliness with anguished squeals of desperation and miserable peals that echo through the vents like some ominous stage-setting on a dungeon scene, perhaps in the Middle Ages, and you have yourself a recipe for madness. Which a lot of people inevitably succumb to, truth be told.

Nonetheless, our Commonwealth loves to lock ‘em up.

The first thing you notice is the bitter cold. With only the thinnest fabrics for clothing, it is impossible to ignore those air-conditioning units set on High. All day, all night, those frigid drafts.

And then we have the pathetic food portions. Meals so meager and lacking that starvation becomes the reality. On most days, I even take to saving my salt packets, if only to preserve a few nutrients for later. My “midnight snack,” as it were.

Here are the brutal conditions employed in interrogation rooms and holding cells throughout the world. The Nazis might be proud to see their tactics still in effect, now decades later. And within the cold, dead hallways of an American prison system, no less!

To be sure, it is a new world playing old tunes.

Anyhow, as the sun sets beyond my cell window, I squeeze my face against the narrow pane in a weird fit of levity, the better to absorb those crucial vitamins. Going to need them to survive the night, after all. Besides, dinner was sparse and I just chewed up my last salt packet.

It’s times like these when a man starts to consider cannibalism, however twisted and self-indulgent.

But the hallucinations are the worst. Strange voices and creepy sounds at all hours of the night. For several days, I thought some schmuck was playing games with me, taunting and goading me through the overhead vent. As it turns out, no one is there. No one at all. This corner of the RHU (Restrictive Housing Unit) is vacant and has been so for several weeks.

Nevertheless, I tried to communicate. My only fear is that one day soon I will get a response. God forbid.

I wonder what Nietzsche had to say about the slow descent into lunacy?