Bartleby

Dead letters! Not so bad a job, Bartleby. Preferable to dead boys or dead dogs. I say, better to assort the words of men for the flames than the flesh of men. Better a ring intended for a finger than a ring from a finger rendered to soot in an oven. Ours is a city of furnaces and smoke stakes and here you are just as quickly a man with a shovel as you are the man being shoveled. A city which gives much must take much, especially in this city of horror and office work. You have seen the seagulls circling, lost, figments in the gray smog. Their bills mottled with garbage and their bellies stuffed with tires. You have heard their shrieks from your courtyard walls. You have witnessed the soot and fog in your wheezing coughs and blackened handkerchief. Sensed the orange city lights through your charcoal blotted windows. In your pale youth you lived and worked in dead letter offices, a city of scorched envelopes and licking flames and ashes flittering. Well, ours is a city of dead men. Here our furnaces scrape the clouds. So, eat nothing, curl into a worm all you like. It makes no matter. Be you gull or dog all figures are rendered moot and figureless beneath a canvass sack. Here, all fellows born of mom and father, are tossed into machines and from these machines, only smoke is returned.