Hope in a Dark Spot
Illustration
by Scott Hoezee

In the novel and movie The Shawshank Redemption, a lifelong convict nicknamed Red, keeps telling his fellow prisoner, Andy, to stop talking about hope since in prison, hope is a dangerous thing. It's better to live without hope than to have a hope that will torment you by virtue of it's not being fulfilled. But then at one point in the story Andy barricades himself in the warden's office, flips on the Shawshank prison P.A. system, and plays a portion of a Mozart opera, bringing the entire prison to a standstill as each prisoner listens to the aria. And even Red, the one who resisted all talk of hopes or dreams, could not resist this spot of beauty. And so Red muses, "I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singin' about. I like to think they were singin' about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared, higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away. For the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank was free."

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