What Is Meant By Modern Day Bartleby

A Modern Day Bartleby

In Melville’s classic 1853 short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, the title character slowly builds into a state of inaction after deciding that he “would prefer not to” do most everything related to his job. The absurdity of such refusal to do anything in the workplace is part of what delights many readers about the short story. It is a resistance slowly stacking up just as the documents might have been on Bartleby’s desk. In some ways it is a reversal of the Myth of Sisyphus, simply letting the boulder roll down its way.

But “would prefer not to” is too passive for me. In my world as a Modern Day Bartleby, I want to “assert not to”. I want to assert not to participate in matters that cause harm to myself and others. I want to assert not to participate in matters that cause harm to societies and communities. I want to assert not to in order to provide alternate ways of being rather than constrained norms that seem so “normal” that we don’t consider their abnormality until we find ourselves in locales where our normal isn’t normal.

Case in point – cars. I am an American. Americans have been trained to believe the following truism: cars=freedom. I grew up looking forward to getting my driver’s license. I looked forward to the streets and avenues and freeways that would open up for me an escape from the lanes and drives and culs-de-sac of my exurbian existence. The freeways provided ways to be free. The highways provided ways towards greater heights. A car enabled me to travel to the magazine shop in Rocky River, Ohio where I’d pick up my music and BMX magazines, to the My Generation record shop in Westlake, Ohio to find the British music my teenage self found more inspirational than the Top 40 I listened to as a pre-teen, to the Ceder Lee Theater in Cleveland Heights to watch the foreign films more interesting to me than what was on offer in America. In college in St. Louis, a car would take me to the independent coffee shops like The Grind in the West End that became my bars, my “third place”, before the progenitors of Second Wave Coffee such as, depending on your region of the US, Starbucks (Seattle), Peet’s (Berkeley), Intelligentsia (Chicago), Caribou (Minneapolis), or Arabica (Cleveland) made their wider footprints. I would drive home from St. Louis to Cleveland passing through major cities like Indianapolis, Louisville, or Columbus and look for coffee shops to refuel along the way. I’d pull over in minor cities too, the key being to locate a local college or university since there was always likely to be some coffee shop along some strip nearby any academic institution worth its diploma parchment.

But then I moved to San Francisco without a car. Seven miles by seven miles made this compact city a difficult place to own a car, yet an easy place not to. I occasionally experienced car life in San Francisco when friends asked me to car-sit when they were off traveling somewhere. I’m not sure if “car-sitting” is a phenomenon elsewhere, since most American cities, in their car-dependency, have car storage available in driveways or apartment garages. However, in San Francisco, car-sitting was necessary. San Franciscans learn to live without such accessible parking accommodations by basically engaging in on-street parking musical chairs. Many a San Franciscan knows the frustration of driving around trying to find on-street parking for the night, trying to avoid street-cleaning logistical mistakes that would result in a ticket for being parked on the wrong side of the street at the wrong time of the wrong day of the week. 

But rather than such frustrations leading me to demand the ‘carnucopia’ of my Midwestern upbring, the car frustrations in San Francisco revealed the car-less possibility of San Francisco. San Francisco is not a suburb. It was not designed for the car, its hills multiple middle fingers to car entitlement. All these frustrations didn’t motivate me to demand changes in San Francisco, to claim entitlement to subsidized car storage, but instead motivated me to make changes in my worldview. I somehow began to consider how, in spite of every car ad that told me otherwise, cars≠freedom. I began to realize how cars constrained me more than liberated me.

I now live in Tokyo, a city where living without a car is tremendously easy thanks to an excellent train system and the amenities that surround them. At my home station of Ayase, a two-exit station, I have two grocery store options on my way home. The other exit has two other grocery store options, with yet another equidistant between the two exits. In addition, there are multiple convenience stores peppered along the way home. As a result, shopping is not done as an extra errand, but as a linked activity on one’s way home, making it a more walkable activity. My wife and I even managed to walk home with our 46 inch TV when we bought it from the remaining DVD rental shop in our neighborhood.

And Tokyo is also a city of normalized bicycling. Yes, I talk to many folks who argue bicycling is dangerous in Tokyo. And I do not want to deny the occasional hazards. However, one cannot argue that bicycling isn’t an everyday activity in Tokyo, not the outlier activity in the two Midwestern cities I spent formative years in, Cleveland and St. Louis. Taking a quick bicycle trip to the grocery store or to pick up a meal or an item at the mall is fully integrated into Tokyo life. My wife and I even managed to bring a twin-sized mattress home from the Japanese Ikea called Nittori via our bicycle. 

Even before I began living in Tokyo, I visited cities in Europe like Vienna, or other Asian cities like Seoul and could clearly see that cities could be designed differently so everyone didn’t have to depend on cars to get around. The entitlement to street parking in the United States is striking to me now living in Tokyo where on-street parking is so rare and before buying a car, one has to provide proof of a space to park the car when not in use.

Yes, you read that correctly – You have to provide proof that you have a place to store your car when buying a car in Tokyo. Downright un-American, huh? Well, this American downright loves the un-American-ness of challenging the entitlement to subsidized car storage that is on-street parking.

And that particular Tokyo law is a microcosm of the wider cosmos that is Modern Day Bartleby actions to assert not to fall into normalized problematic actions and design. Tokyo is asserting not to let the car rule. Tokyo makes it easier for me to assert not to let the car rule. And such is an example of other Modern Day Bartleby matters I will write about here.