Walk

"At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable", originally uploaded by niznoz.

"What miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall-street is deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building too, which of week-days hums with industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn. And here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous—a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage!" - Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street

By the time Melville wrote Bartleby -- the story of the scrivener whose passive resistance so aggravates the narrator -- at least two qualities of the financial district were already evident. The dual nature of the neighborhood was well established: a buzzing hive by day, a desert at night and on Sundays. And resistance to Wall Street, passive or otherwise, was clearly useless.

Melville's birthplace at 6 Pearl Street is perhaps an example of this. The modest house is long gone, and the only trace of Melville's presence is a plaque and a bust of the author hidden behind plexiglass in a sconce at the base of towering white office building.

# posted by nick @ 9:04 pm