I Would Prefer Not To

Whenever I feel I should post an entry, but fail so to do, I think of Bartleby.  Bartleby the Scrivener, as he is usually called, the curious character at the centre of an 1853 story ("A Story of Wall Street") by Herman Melville.  

Bartleby is a copyist in a Manhattan law office--copyists being essential in a pre-Xerox age.  But whenever Bartleby is given an assignment, a brief to copy, he responds "I would prefer not to."  

This is, in fact, all we ever hear from Bartleby, and that he continues to hold his job is a puzzlement. (We have all known people who remained employed while seeming to do nothing, but few have been as up-front about it as Bartleby.)

Herman Melville, best known for "Moby-Dick" (of which Harold Ross famously asked "Is Moby-Dick the man or the whale?") was both the most transparent and most enigmatic of writers, depending on which page you're on.

I asked Bartleby if he would fill in for me, while I recover from a surfeit of Yuletide cheer, but he responded as usual:  "I prefer not to."

And that is why there is no entry today.