It seemed to me that I should have to have a desk, even though I had no real need for a desk. I was afraid that if I had no desk in my room my life would seem too haphazard.
The desk looked incomplete when I got it set up, so I found a wire basket and put that on it, and threw a few things in it. This basket, however, gave me a lot of trouble for the first couple of weeks. I had always had two baskets in New York. One said IN, the other OUT. At intervals a distribution boy would sneak into the room, deposit something in IN, remove the contents of OUT. Here, with only one basket, my problem was to decide whether it was IN or OUT, a decision a person of some character could have made promptly and reasonably but which I fooled round with for days—tentative, hesitant, trying first one idea then another, first a day when it would be IN, then a day when it would be OUT, then, somewhat desperately, trying to combine the best features of both and using it as a catch-all for migratory papers no matter which way they were headed. This last was disastrous. I found a supposedly out-going letter buried for a week under some broadsides from the local movie house. The basket is now IN. I discovered by test that fully ninety per cent of whatever was on my desk at any given moment were IN things. Only ten per cent were OUT things—almost too few to warrant a special container. This, in general, must be true of other people’s lives too. It is the reason lives get so cluttered up—so many things (except money) filtering in, so few things (except strength) draining out. The phenomenon is difficult for me to understand and has not been explained, to my knowledge, by physicists: how it is that, with a continuous interchange of goods or “things” between people, everybody can have more coming in (except money) than going out (except strength).
My inability to make a simple decision concerning a desk basket is an indication of some curious nervous weakness. Psychiatrists know about it, I don’t doubt, and have plenty of theories about its cause and cure. Question: Does a psychiatrist have an IN basket?
Every year or so one reads about a railroad conductor on a suburban train making his last run and being fêted by the passengers, most of whom know him well. This sort of farewell celebration seems to be peculiar to railroad men. All sorts of other people step out of harness and nobody thinks much about it, but a railroad man finishing his work excites the populace unduly. I think this is probably because commuters see, in conductors and brakemen and engineers, the personification of their own frustrated transit—a man who has ridden far and got nowhere. Journey’s end for a conductor on a commuter’s run is an occasion of unequalled sadness, a sadness so poignant that it usually must be drowned in gin if there is a club car on the train. Somebody has reached the end of the strange run, from here to there and back again.