His exasperated boss, a lawyer who owns the offices in question and is also the narrator of the tale, after failing to motivate him or even to get him to leave, relocates himself, leaving Bartleby behind. The legal copyist working in a New York law office one day simply refuses to do his work, content to sit at his desk, day-in and day-out, re-iterating only the bland statement: ‘I’d prefer not to’. It was then that Bartleby the Scrivener spoke to me.Ī character whose thoughts and motivations are impossible to eke out, he leaves the reader as well as his fellow characters flummoxed. And that I was not only not going to be there to celebrate that but that I’d probably be curling up, like a hedgehog at home, alone, with no job in sight for the foreseeable future, looking towards a life that was not hopeless but unknowable, like a blank slate. Suddenly, watching the Federal Chancellor talk on my laptop screen, I realised archival science was about to experience a revival. Maintaining the records to always have something on file when you couldn’t travel to another country, maybe due to political or financial reasons. Keeping history alive for posterity, that was it, in a nutshell. Just a few weeks ago, I’d been working in one of the largest media archives in Europe, indexing, cataloguing, sorting and watching through piles and piles of original video footage-all the things you’d never see in the news for fear of the amount of gore or even just for the plain shaky camera movements. I’d just left an internship and was in the middle of applying for jobs, when, out of nowhere, the Austrian government decided to proclaim a nationwide lockdown. Technology, politics and societal mores may have been transformed yet the rhythm of daily work, in some ways, never did.Ī few months ago, I was scouring the internet looking for a quick read to divert myself from the spectre of moral panic that was Covid-19. Give or take a 150 years, not much has changed. A feather quill lying on a sheet of paper. Credit to Bill Bragg, (2012)Ī blinking computer screen, a cursor stuck on a blank page.
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