In Emma Donoghue’s novel “Room”, the Room is described as “home to Jack, but to Ma, it’s the prison where she’s been held since she was nineteen-for seven long years.”

Mental confinement versus physical confinement.

For some of us, we may consider these one and the same. There are few people who enter into physical confinement willingly. Perhaps monks and nuns do when they choose to spend the rest of their lives in a cell, as their sleeping quarters is called. There is not much difference in the size of the cell that a single convict is assigned to and the one assigned to a monk or nun.

The difference really lies in their mental states. The prisoner is not only confined physically, he is confined mentally. He longs for the day that he can be freed from captivity. He lives in the future.

For monks and priests, the perspective…