The Office

It has finally happened. After years of working on the outside of the office world, I have an office of my own now—with more offices around it, all residing (side by side) in a larger office (they call it a "suite" but I know better), which occupies a 75-story "office tower" full of many, many, many such offices, suites, sub-suites and sub-offices. From a vast, all-seeing distance, hovering somewhere in the blue dome above, I spot my barely distinguishable speck of a body rushing alongside other animate specks, filing swiftly into the ground-floor entrance, converging into a chain of bodies which drone, conveyor-like, up the long escalator, separating and then clustering again in one of several elevators, all of the specks (now a few globs of specks) coursing upward, each pair of eyes looking forward, down, up, each consciousness housed in its own interior space. I grow dizzy imagining this layered spatial map, positively faint with the thought of my person within it. Yet with so little experience working in this strange, compartmental, insular, habitual environment, I find that I am extremely at home in it, maybe even made for it.

Understandably I am concerned. As someone who spent the whole of his twenties resisting and in practice rejecting the notion of Office Life, the prospect of joining a Corporation, the project of climbing The Ladder, the drudgery of working every day from nine to five, I am understandably concerned. Concerned that I've gone back on my words (and so many of them to go back on). Or worse, that all those words, and the views that begot them, were just a transient feature of my age, and probably based on insufficient facts. Either way, I feel recently unsettled in myself. I look at the young man I was and wonder if he had any idea what he was about. I look at the man I am now and wonder if I've begun some insidious process of forgetting. Or is there only the present, the eternal present, and am I only faced now as always with what I make of it, what I make it into?

And where have I been these last several years, leading up to my entrance into office life? To people who ask me this, I say that I was working in "the university," or "the academy," or more simply "academia." To which they smile, lips together, and shake their heads in either wistfulness or sympathy, I can't tell which.

Those years when I was a teacher of writing, and a student of writing myself, I preferred academia as a name for that rich world of mine—rich with books, with ideas, with long walks and even longer discussions ("discourses" we liked to call them), with leisurely afternoons of reading in cafés, passing on know-how to rapt young pupils (some of them), absorbing insight from inspired, inspiriting teachers. No pedestrian noun, with demystifying article, could satisfactorily evoke those soul-nourishing hours in Academia.

The truth is, when I did say good-bye to that magical place and left its verdant purlieus for good, I was good and ready to leave. My last stint of teaching took place at a community college north of Seattle, the city where I now live and work. A nondescript huddle of low, forgettable, entirely pragmatic buildings (structures, rather), the campus of this small college did little to stimulate me. It was not the tree-lined, quadrangle-cored, river-skirted, café-studded, stoneworked and brickworked idyll I had grown to associate with and stubbornly expect from a true collegiate environment. And the work of teaching, at least the work of teaching composition, was becoming to me as limp and pallid as these underfunded institutional surroundings. Writing was still something I did with passion, still an activity that brought me pleasure and consolation. But teaching young people how to do it, having to convince them it was worth their...