I Prefer Not To

I prefer not to.

This must be the week for quitting. Governor Sarah Palin (R. Alaska) announced at a hastily assembled press conference yesterday at her suburban Wasilla home that she was resigning as Governor 16 months before her term ends because she doesn’t want to put Alaska through the anguish of her lame-duck term. Though I suppose many Alaskans are relieved they will be spared Palin’s lameness for the next year and a half, for most casual observers, the move is a confusing one.

And back in the real world where things are infinitely less interesting but no less confusing, in the depths of the recession’s strangle hold on the economy, as unemployment continues its unwavering march toward a ball-busting, rusty brass-ringed 10%, I resigned my position at the swanky advertising company where I’ve been playing at grown-up, long-pantsed big-boy worker bee for the past eleven and a half months.

This is not in furtherance of my unannounced intentions to announce my intention to assemble an intention assessing assemblage to study the feasibility of a run in 2012. It’s not.

It’s because, in the words of perhaps God’s loneliest quitter in history, “I prefer not to.”

When Herman Melville wrote his baleful ballad “Bartleby the Scrivener” in the early 1850s, he was at the height of his literary prowess, fresh from en-tome-ing his peg-legged mad sea captain and his pale monstrosity of the deep and his not-necessarily-gay seaman in a moody, broody adolescent-reader-defeating treatise that would serve as a pseudo-intellectual breaking board for the next 150 odd years.

"Not gone!" I murmured at last.

Moby Dick was destined to be a flop in Melville’s lifetime and, when sitting down to compose “Bartleby” he may already have had a inkling of his own eventual destiny, banished to a customs house copy desk, efficiently, if listlessly, pushing documents from one point to the next, conducting papers through the business world’s passionless stations of the cross to feed his family and pay his mortgage and do … something. When Melville the professional man walked into the office on Gansevoort Street in lower Manhattan and hung up his topcoat and lit his lamp and unscrewed his inkpot, the professional man may have lived, but the writer died.

What was left was alcoholism and an unhappy marriage and rumors of insanity and, of course, after thirty years of office bondage and no writing, Billy Bud, but that ain’t exactly what you’d call a happy read. Authority wins, passion loses, and the sea captain, (Captain Vere – like veritas, like truth) acting “by the book” has the hero, the honest, Adam-esque, Christ-like Billy, executed. Hung from the yardarm. His last words, delivered without irony or bitterness, “God bless Captain Vere”

Once Bartleby ceases to do any work for the lawyer narrator, you would assume he would stop coming to the office. But he doesn’t. Because he doesn’t have any place else to go or, even worse, can’t think of any place else to go. We find out later that poor, doomed Bartleby’s previous job was at the dead letter office in Washington, DC where undeliverable letters (or unwanted writings) were sent to be burned. If that wouldn’t crush the soul of the sensitive writer boy, I don’t know what would.

Toward the end of Bartleby’s story, the lawyer visits him in the Tombs where he’s been sent for vagrancy and trespassing (if you don’t work there, you don’t work there) and finds him curled into the fetal position, pressed up against the brick wall of his cell.

“Strangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up and lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones, I saw the wasted Bartleby.

“But nothing stirred. I paused, then went close up to him, stooped over, and saw that his dim eyes were open; otherwise he seemed profoundly sleeping.”

"Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!"

Much like the posture I’ve begun imagining for myself as I’ve felt gravity’s cruel grip dragging me from my ergonomically friendly desk chair toward the cool, dark space under my cube. I’m not wired to spend all day every day, ad infinitum, in the same office doing the same thing, filling out spreadsheets and leveraging my efficiencies. I may starve out here as sensitive lit boy, as God’s lonely writer lad, but at least I’ll starve doing what I need to do instead of what I’m told to do.

And perhaps that is how Mrs. Palin imagines her own future if she were to finish her elected term as Governor of Alaska, her promise dripping away daily like melting wax, her future dissolving as she sits there, day after day, vetoing bills and accusing TV personalities of baby-raping and mocking her special needs son, as she has to decline countless invitations to host hyperbolically heated television programs of her own. Perhaps she could finish out her term if she wanted, she just prefers not to.

Tags: Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville, Moby Dick, New York City, quitting, Sarah Palin