Bartleby, Beckett & some former selves

The weave this week was Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, diverse landing places in the New Yorker, and my diary from 50 years ago, to say nothing of last night's dream. Francine Prose has published her account of 1974, A Personal History, and I have re-read mine for the same year— she is the same age as me, Brooklyn-jewish as I am Nowhere-jewish. Francine Prose lived out the politics of the counterculture; I moved to Ireland, ate the evening light and wanted to tell everything, which may have been a passion born of displacement, or just the age I was at, soused in language, and the new solitude of an unfamiliar place. 

Reading Bartleby was like home. The gentle language of refusal. I prefer not to. Those who prefer not to do not prosper and not prospering is what they prefer. What's hypnotic about Bartleby is this gentle, melancholic space. You land there and it's so much quieter than refusing cookies on a website; it isn't countercultural, it isn't a protest, Bartleby enters the central void, or great peace, not against anything, nor for anything either, mildly dismissing every intervention, up to and including his own life.

For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a not unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam. I remembered the bright silks and sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swan-like sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway; and I contrasted them with the pallid copyist, and thought to myself, Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay, but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.