In the middle of last century, C. Wright Mills bought a contraption called a Shopsmith, an all-in-one, five-foot-long workbench that included a lathe, a disk sander, a table saw, two drill presses, and a jigsaw. He was waiting for Oxford University Press to send him galleys of his new book, "White Collar," a study of office workers. He paid for his Shopsmith with royalties he earned translating from German into English the essays of Max Weber, including one on bureaucracy. Then he bought an old farmhouse on five acres of land in Pomona, New York. on Mondays, Wednesdays, an Fridays, he'd ride his motorcycle from the farm, where he hoped to grow vegetables, to Columbia University, where he taught sociology. (He'd built the motorcycle himself, in a factory in Germany.)
I wrote the name of C. Wright Mills down on a post-it note, below the names of Wes Anderson, Rebecca Solnit, Craig Childs, "that obituary of the guy who did high altitude archeology" and "that poet in Salida who restores old houses."
I quit my job because I wished to live deliberately. I do not know exactly what this means or what sort of life I will stumble upon as I try to figure it out, but these six people offer me a clue. Pay attention to the people you envy, goes the common wisdom. That is my reason for starting this blog: to pay attention as I try to figure out what it is I want from life and how I want to support myself.
*Then We Came To The End, Joshua Ferris. One of the best portraits of office life anywhere in print.
