It is difficult to reconcile Shannon's life of action with his life of thought, for he was a man of intellect, a student and a thinker. His use of English was always correct. The range of his reading was wide, including the best fiction, philosophy, science, and, more unusual, the English essayists—Addison, Steele, and other contributors to The Spectator. The true philosopher is shown in the following extract from one of his letters to me:
"I beg you not to think that I consider myself a martyr to the cause of truth. That my statement was rejected takes nothing from the naked fact, but simply proves the failure of conditions by which it was to be established as such. It did not come within the rules of acceptance in these things, consequently it was not accepted. This is a world of method. Things should be in their place. People do not go to a fish-monger for diamonds, nor to a prison for truth. I recognize the incongruity of my position and submit to the inevitable."
In explanation of his reception of my first call he writes:
"I don't think that at first I quite understood the nature of your call—it was so unexpected. If my meaning in what I said was obscure it was because in thinking and brooding too much one becomes unable to talk and gradually falls into a state where words seem unnatural. And these prison thoughts are terrible. In their uselessness they are like spiders building cobwebs in the brain, clouding it and clogging it beyond repair. I try to use imagination as a drug to fill my mind with a fanciful contentment that I can know in no other way. When I was a child I used to dream and speculate in anticipation of the world that was coming. Now I do the same, but for a different reason—to make me forget the detestable period of fact that has intervened.
"So when I am not reading or sleeping, and when my work may be performed mechanically and with least mental exertion, I live away from myself and surroundings as much as possible. I was in a condition something like this at the time of your call. A dreamer dislikes at best to be awakened and in a situation like mine it is especially trying. While talking in this way I must beg pardon, for I did really appreciate your visit and felt more human after it. I would not have you infer from this that the slightest imagination entered into my story of that unfortunate affair. I would it were so; but if it is a fact that I exist, all that I related is just as true."
His choice of Schopenhauer as a friend illustrates the homœopathic principle of like curing like.
"Schopenhauer is an old friend and favorite of mine. Very often when I am getting wretchedly blue and when everything as seen through my eyes is wearing a most rascally tinge, I derive an immense amount of comfort and consolation by thinking how much worse they have appeared to Schopenhauer." In other words, the great pessimist served to produce a healthy reaction.
But this reaction was but for the hour. All through Shannon's letters there runs a vein of the bitterest pessimism. He distrusted all forms of religion and arraigns the prison chaplains in these words:
"I have never met a class of men who appear to know less of the spiritual nature or the wants of their flocks. It is strange to me that men, who might so easily gather material for the finest practical lessons, surrounded as they are by real life experiences and illustrations by which they might well teach that crime does not pay either in coin or happiness, that they will ignore all this and rack their brains to produce elaborate theological discourses founded upon some sentence of a fisherman who existed two thousand years ago, to paralyze and mystify a lot of poor plain horse thieves and burglars. What prisoners are in need of is a man able to preach natural, every-day common sense, with occasionally a little humor or an agreeable story or incident to illustrate a moral. It seems to me if I were to turn preacher I would try and study the simple character of the great master as it is handed down to us."