Taylor M. Polites is the author of The Rebel Wife, an engrossing novel about a resilient heroine in the post-Civil War South. Before he was a novelist, Polites spent years in the labyrinth of Wall Street. We at Off the Shelf have borrowed a great piece he wrote for 250words.com about how that experience reminded him of one of our favorite books of all time, Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, a book that should be read by office dwellers everywhere.
I spent thirteen years at a “premier global investment bank,” toiling like Melville’s Bartleby (until I, too, preferred not to) among partnership agreements, K-1 tax forms, and annual reports. I knew many who were like the dead-eyed Bartleby and his fractious, grumbling co-scriveners, Nippers and Turkey. I was one of them myself. In Melville’s story, the men were legal copyists, endlessly laboring with pen and ink to produce contracts in quintuplicate. Today’s business culture demands even deeper immersion, and I lost more than a few evenings and weekends to the machine. Others had it worse, pulling all-nighters, even coming in from family funerals and marital crises or while suffering from fevers, chills, and bronchial effusions. Bartleby lived at his office, sleeping on his boss’s sofa, washing at his desk, living off ginger cakes. No wonder he would stand staring blindly out of a window into a neighboring brick wall. The vista from my cube included rows of other fluorescent-lit cubes and a glass-walled conference room, which looked across the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan into other offices where workers toiled at their computers under similar fluorescent lights. The endless cycle of fundraising, investing, and harvesting was quantified in regular installments by herds of lawyers and accountants who tabulated results to show the worth of what we were all doing.
The machine can eat people like it eats profits. So my advice is to not let it. Love finance, if that is your passion. But make space for those other things that give you breath, passion, and interest. Something with nothing to do with EBITDA or P/E ratios. Read. Write. Knit. Garden. Paint. Cook. Create. Make things. Feed all your interests. Don’t be a Bartleby.
For more great business stories and book recommendations visit 250words.com.
