I’ll drop the prison chronology right there, and concentrate on bringing to light as many more interesting wrinkles of Epictetus and his Stoicism as time will allow.

I would like to say straight off that I have read through and studied the Discourses, at least 10 times, to say nothing of my many excursions into the Enchiridion, and I have never found a single inconsistency in Epictetus’s code of tenets. It is a put-together package, free of contradictions. The old boy may or may not appeal to you, but if he turns you off, don’t blame it on incoherence; Epictetus has no problem with logic.

I think more needs to be said about good and evil. After all, the Stoic is indifferent to everything but good and evil. In Stoic thought, our good and our evil come from the same locus. “Vice and virtue reside in the will alone.” “The essence of good and evil lies in an attitude of the will.” Solzhenitsyn locates it in the heart, and Epictetus would buy that, or will,
or moral purpose, or character, or soul, he’s not a nitpicker about things like that. What he bears down on is that your good and your evil are the essence of you. You are moral purpose. You are rational will. You are not hair, you are not skin, you are moral purpose-get that beautiful, and you will be beautiful.

That was revealed to Solzhenitsyn when he felt within himself the first stirrings of good. And in that chapter, the old Russian elaborated other truths about good and evil. Not only does the line separating them not pass between political or cultural or ethnic groupings, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts, he adds that for any individual over the years, this separation line within the heart shifts, oscillates somewhat. That even in hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead to good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains an un-uprooted small corner of evil. There is some good and some evil in all of us, and that’s Stoic doctrine. In that same chapter, Solzhenitsyn comments: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

I just want you to know that I connect with that. In a crucible like a torture prison, you reflect, you silently study what makes those about you tick. Once I had taken the measure of my torture guard, watched his eyes as he worked, watched him move, felt him move as he stood on my slumped-over back and cinched up the ropes pulling my shoulders together, I came to know that there was good in him. That was ironic because when he first came in with the new commissar when torture was instigated after I got there, I had nicknamed him “Pigeye” because of the total vacancy of the stare of the one eye he presented as he peeked through cell door peepholes. He was my age, balding and wiry, quick, lithe and strong, like an athletic trainer. He was totally, emotionless, thus his emotionless eyes. He had almost no English-language capability, just motions and grunts. Under orders, he put me through the ropes 15 times over the years, and rebroke my bad leg once, I feel sure inadvertently. It was a court martial scene and he was having to give me the ropes before a board of North Vietnamese officers. The officers sat at a long table before Pigeye and me, and behind us was a semi-circle of soldiers bearing rifles with fixed bayonets at a kind of “dangle” position, the bayonet pointing at the cement floor ahead of them. This was in the “knobby” torture room of “New Guy village” at Hoa Lo prison in August 1967 – so-called because the walls had been crudely speckled with blobs of cement the size of an ice cream scoop in a “soundproofing” attempt. I could tell Pigeye was nervous because of these officers whom I had never seen before, and I don’t think he had, and he pressed me flat over my bad leg instead of the good one he had always put the tension on before. The healing knee cartilage gave way with a loud “pop,” and the officers looked at each other and then got up and left. I couldn’t get off that floor and onto my feet for nearly two months.

In all those years, we probably had no more than 24 hours, one-on-one together. But neither of us ever broke the code of an unvaryingly strict “line of duty” relationship. He never tricked me, always played it straight, and I begged no mercy. I admired that in him, and I could tell he did in me. And when people say: “He was a torturer, didn’t you hate him?” I say, like Solzehnitsyn, to the astonishment of those about me, “No, he was a good soldier, never overstepped his line of duty.”

By that time, I had learned that fear and guilt are the real pincers that break men’s wills. I would chant under my breath as I was marched to interrogation, knowing that I must refuse to comply, and take the ropes: “Your eyes must show no fear, they must show no guilt.” The North Vietnamese had learned never to take a prisoner “downtown”- to the payoff for what our whole treatment regime was about – public propaganda exploitation – unless he was truly intimidated, unless they were sure he felt fear. Their threats had no meanings unless you felt fear. They had suffered the political damage of several, including myself, who had acted up, spoken up, and blurted out the truth to the hand-picked audience of foreigners at the press conference. Book IV of the Discourses: “When a man who has set his will neither on dying nor upon living at any cost, comes into the presence of the tyrant, what is there to prevent him from being without fear? Nothing.”