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I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.
Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, "I would prefer not to."
Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. If the individual so resisted be of a not inhumane temper, and the resisting one perfectly harmless in his passivity; then, in the better moods of the former, he will endeavor charitably to construe to his imagination what proves impossible to be solved by his judgment.
For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me.
Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.
My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion.
They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill.
What I saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.
Somehow, of late I had got into the way of involuntarily using this word "prefer" upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions.
One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning.
"What earthly right have you to stay here? Do you pay any rent? Do you pay my taxes? Or is this property yours?"
But thus it often is, that the constant friction of illiberal minds wears out at last the best resolves of the more generous.
Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames?
