“Bartleby, the Scrivener”

Quitting

BARTLEBY, a clerk in a story by Herman Melville, is the patron saint of quitters. He’s the yin to the yang of Ahab, the Melville character who absolutely refuses to quit in his pursuit of Moby Dick, a big white whale.

I found myself thinking of Bartleby at a tech conference in Austin, Texas. I was listening to a lecture by a famous venture capitalist who had made hundreds of millions for his investors and himself by funding Internet start-ups. In his speech, he rattled off the names of some global business legends, people who had founded many of the world’s most successful companies. He asked the audience to consider what these people had in common. Then he answered the question he had just posed:

“They never gave up.”

I found this inspiring. It’s not an original message. But it’s a compelling one. We’ve been told this all our lives: Winners never quit, and quitters never win. But as I pondered it more that day, it began to gnaw at me. First, all these business legends probably had quit something—school or another career. Maybe they’d originally wanted to be jazz musicians and basketball stars, and maybe they quit those pursuits. That they didn’t quit the activity that finally made them famous tells me very little. And is obvious.

That’s when Bartleby popped into my head.

I parked that thought.

Then I came across a video that was being widely shared on the Internet. It was a graduation speech at the University of Texas at Austin given by a genuine hero, a man who had for thirty-seven years served the United States with great honor as a Navy SEAL and who had attained the rank of admiral and commander of US Special Operations. He was giving advice on how to change the world, based on his experiences from navy training, the SEALs being the elite special forces arm of the US Navy. It seemed to me to be excellent advice—starting with making your bed every morning, something my mother also taught me (though it didn’t quite stick). But then came the end of the speech. He was describing a bell that was in the center of the training compound. And he said that when you rang the bell during SEAL training, it meant you were done, finished, you quit. The bell was always there. You could ring it at any time. You could ring it if the training was too grueling, if you no longer wanted to wake up at 5:00 a.m., if you were sick of swimming in freezing water, if you were worn out, if you decided that this whole Navy SEAL thing just wasn’t for you.

His advice was simple, he said. “If you want to change the world, don’t ever, ever ring the bell.”

And I thought, Hell, no.

I mean, sometimes you have to ring the bell. Or admit that your business is tanking. Or just plain give up. Even if you really want to change the world.

It’s of course true that everyone who succeeds didn’t give up—how could it be otherwise? But it’s also true that many people kept going years after they should have stopped. Many people bankrupted themselves and their families pursuing a dream they had no chance of achieving. And in a culture where no one is allowed to fail, it’s preferable to lie about where you are than admit you are in trouble, especially if that admission means that every lifeline will be immediately removed.

“Fake it till you make it” is great in theory. But often it really means fake it until you go under.

And as for not ringing that bell—that just doesn’t make sense. The bell is there to be rung. If you realize that you don’t have the stamina or motivation to be a Navy SEAL, then of course you should ring the bell. With no shame whatsoever. The last thing we want in the Navy SEALs are people who don’t think they have what it takes to be there. And they should be encouraged to self-identify as soon as possible.

Bartleby popped back into my head.

I’m a longtime bell ringer. I bail. If I’m reading a book and I don’t care for it, I stop. At the theater, if I’m bored, I’ll leave. I will wait until intermission—but then I’ll run, not walk, to the nearest exit.

The other day I was watching a television show and saw footage of a young British man who decided he really wanted to try bungee jumping—the extreme sport where you plunge off a bridge or tower and hurtle toward the ground, with the only thing coming between you and death (or horrid injury) a rubber cord fixed around your ankles. This young man got to the top of a bungee platform in Thailand and was all set to jump. He confessed at that moment to being more than a little scared. Not uncommon in the world of bungee—the woman who was set to jump right before him had decided, after several minutes of hesitation, not to jump. Back down she went.

Again, there was Bartleby.

But this fellow decided to ignore his fear. So he jumped anyway. And something happened that almost never happens: the cord became detached from his ankles. And so he didn’t bounce right back up as he expected but rather plunged like a missile into the hard surface of a lake. He was going eighty miles per hour when he hit the water, and he sustained grievous injuries. His spleen ruptured on impact; his liver tore; his lungs collapsed. He almost died. Only after a month in the hospital in Bangkok was he able to return home.

That’s what can happen if you don’t quit when the voice in your head tells you to. But there’s also a danger to quitting every time you experience fear or uncertainty or anxiety or trepidation. If you do that, you miss out on adventure and excitement. You don’t expand your world. And sometimes no matter how much you might like to quit, you really shouldn’t.

The key is knowing what’s at stake.

Certainly a great deal was at stake when Winston Churchill said in a 1941 speech, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

Thank goodness Winston Churchill and the British people had such firm resolve during World War II. Ringing the bell, as it were, would have been catastrophic for the world. Sometimes quitting isn’t an option. But much of the time, it is.

Often, though, the hardest thing isn’t quitting—it’s staying quit. People may try to coax you back into the game. You may well try to do that to yourself.

It can be very hard to stick to giving up, much harder than persevering. The reason for persevering is often clear—as it was for the British and Churchill in 1941. And sometimes it’s clear on a much more modest scale—I’m not giving up because I don’t want to and I don’t have to. That’s as good a reason as any.

But the reasons for calling it a day (and keeping it called) are frequently less obvious. Perhaps it’s plain old fear, as experienced by our first prospective bungee jumper. Or boredom and irritation, as it so often is when I put down a book or leave a show. The world demands an answer. Often we don’t have one.

Literature gives remarkably little guidance to those of us who constantly grapple with the urge to quit—but we do have Bartleby the Scrivener in the short story of the same name, which Melville published two years after Moby-Dick. (The subtitle is “A Story of Wall Street.”)

Bartleby’s tale is told by the head of a law office who has two clerks (law copyists, also known as scriveners) and an office boy working for him. He brings in a third clerk, the enigmatic Bartleby, “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn.”

As our narrator describes, “At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically.”

Bartleby works quietly and steadily for two days until he is asked, on the third, to perform a routine task: his boss needs help comparing a brief document with its copy. “Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation,” the narrator writes, “when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, ‘I would prefer not to.’ ”

That’s just the start of Bartleby’s insubordination. Bartleby refuses more and more tasks, again with that phrase, though he does continue diligently copying documents. Other odd behaviors emerge; it seems Bartleby is living at the office. Eventually, after attempting to reason with Bartleby, our narrator gives up and decides he must fire Bartleby, albeit with generous severance. But he is unsuccessful in that: Bartleby would prefer not to leave. Our narrator then moves the office to another building to rid himself of Bartleby. But even this doesn’t work: Bartleby refuses to leave even when the old office has new tenants. And always with that phrase, “I would prefer not to.” Finally, after Bartleby has defied all entreaties to vacate the premises, the police are called, and he is hauled off to prison, where he prefers not to sustain his own life.

What makes Bartleby so radical is not that he refuses to do what’s asked of him; it’s that he refuses to give a reason. He refuses to tell the narrator a single thing about himself, not where he was born, not anything. He even refuses to give a reason why he won’t say anything. Bartleby has quit explaining himself solely because he prefers not to. And this is the most irksome and revolutionary act imaginable. As our infuriated narrator observes: “Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.”

Sure, Henry David Thoreau quit the world of possessions to retire to a cabin in the woods—but he then wrote a whole book, Walden, explaining why and what he found. That’s the model. If you quit your job, you are likely to have an exit interview. Sure, you are free to answer, “I would prefer not to.” But most people bow to the pressure and wind up explaining themselves. If I quit Facebook for even a few days, I feel as though I owe the world an explanation and usually give one.

There’s a noble history of resigning in protest. Everyone understands that—the noisy, principled exit, where you announce the reason that you can no longer participate or even bear to have your presence count as an endorsement. But just plain quitting? That frays the fabric of society.

There are some things that I probably quit too early. I would love to play the piano, but I couldn’t be bothered to practice and soon gave it up. And there are things that I probably should have quit far earlier than I did. I’ve made some terrible business decisions in my time and have been guilty of pouring good company money after bad because I was too stubborn to admit even to myself that I had made a mistake.

Admittedly, Bartleby may not be the most appealing model of resistance, and yet the purity of his stance, and the confidence with which he manages to maintain it, offer a weirdly refreshing touchstone in a society that is terrified of people who can’t be threatened or induced to participate in activities they don’t like. I don’t worry that the world will ever suffer from a lack of piano players or people like me to applaud them. But I do worry that we don’t offer one another enough support when we just want to quit what we are doing for no reason other than that we would prefer not.