Bartleby, the Scrivener: Oh, how I am glad to be rid of thee
I do this all the time: I leave papers until the last minute. Today was cutting it quite fine even for this habit, though: The paper was due at 5:00 PM, and I began it around 12:00 PM. I also took about half an hour off for lunch, though I only did that because I was reasonably sure I would finish the paper in time. I did. I got it in at around 4:50 PM.
To clarify where I’m coming from, of course I didn’t actually do the entire paper today. Most of the actual preparation for a paper (for me, at least) happens before a single word is written…er…typed. So I ended up reading Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener for the first time at about one o’clock this morning and thought for a while about the problem. I was still thinking about it before my alarm went off at noon today. I finally came up with what I was going to say relatively late, at around 12:30 PM. And, spending the rest of the time writing (excluding the half an hour in the cafeteria), I bloviated all about Bartleby.
I am so SICK of Bartleby! I suppose I felt sorry for him when I first read the story, but after paging through the thing looking for evidence, it lost a lot of its luster. Plus, it’s Melville, so it’s not like the thing couldn’t have been about a quarter its length without the actual plot suffering any—remember, it was Herman Melville who wrote Moby-Dick. After that, anything’s possible. I mean, there are some people who never finished that book before they died, and they started when they were infants!
Other than that, I haven’t accomplished anything of real import this week. I just wanted to have a go at Bartleby. Though if he were here, he would most likely say, “I would prefer that you didn’t.”
