The Gathering Payback

[Fiona Shnapple]

There would seem little need for proceeding further in this history.
Imagination will readily supply the meagre recital of poor Bartleby’s
interment. But ere parting with the reader, let me say, that if this
little narrative has sufficiently interested him, to awaken curiosity
as to who Bartleby was, and what manner of life he led prior to the
present narrator’s making his acquaintance, I can only reply, that in
such curiosity I fully share, but am wholly unable to gratify it. Yet
here I hardly know whether I should divulge one little item of rumor,
which came to my ear a few months after the scrivener’s decease. Upon
what basis it rested, I could never ascertain; and hence, how true it
is I cannot now tell. But inasmuch as this vague report has not been
without a certain strange suggestive interest to me, however sad, it
may prove the same with some others; and so I will briefly mention it.
The report was this: that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the
Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly
removed by a change in the administration. When I think over this
rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. Dead
letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and
misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more
fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead
letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they
are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale
clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in
the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would
relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died
despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those
who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these
letters speed to death. 250
  Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95gu6758320

On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 7:02 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> p.340
> "terrible black ash billowing [...] that was the moment [...] When
> everything was revealed [...] a rush of blackness and death. Showing us what
> we've become, what we've been all the time. [...] living on borrowed time".
> [...] and meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the
> innocent dead.  Boo fucking hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent.
> There's no uninnocent dead."
> [...]
> "it's a koan."
>
> This koan mean its opposite.  None of our dead are innocent. We all are due
> a payback. We all share a mountain of collective guilt.
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l