June 5, 2020

These days, the Covid19 virus has decided that we must all be given the chance to see whether we can stand ourselves. So, being sequestered at home is de rigueur for most citizens, especially those in cities.

The avoidance of personal introspection, the usual in high-rise office skyscrapers and other such places, is being foiled. Now, stuck at home, we must deal with ourselves instead of with the pursuit of the corporate summit, the elbowing aside of others in the way of that pursuit, the plot to do an end run past the schmuck senior managers, and other such.

I have witnessed all these and many more, during a business career that lasted twenty-five years. The printing industry (you remember printing, don’t you?), and the early high-tech software industry, in San Francisco and New York City. The most memorable for me was the most recent: a contract position as a senior marketing writer for a small, avidly ambitious, hotshot branding firm in San Francisco. I think I was hired by the CEO of that company, who was about thirty, because of my many published books. He introduced me on my first day in the firm as “a real writer.” This got a lot of laughter. I could not tell if the glee in the room was at my expense, since most of the staff were tech people and therefore uncommunicative. Perhaps they didn’t know what a writer is. Or maybe they were already, despite their being in their twenties, failures when it came to their childhood fantasies of adventure and derring-do. I would not be able to tell you.

In any case, my contract was for several months, and I spent the time in one of those frenetic, noisy group environments (long tables, multiple computers, countless programmers, and endless noise) that offer no escape, and drive crazy any employee who cares about his or her privacy.  I was handsomely paid for the work I did helping re-brand a San Francisco Bay Area power-grid development company, and was let go a month before the end of my contract, without explanation. I suspect it was that I was unable to summon enthusiasm for writing poorly about the power grid. Writing poorly is the standard for branding firms. These companies make up all those one- or two-sentence word-play slogans that you see everywhere on the sides of municipal buses, on billboards, TV ads, and the internet. They are attempts at sales humor that are generally not funny. The power grid itself, of course, is not funny, and I couldn’t summon up the appropriate cutesy-pie prose that the CEO expected me to provide.

In whatever case, I was gone.

So, I returned to my home office, sequestered myself there, and got back to the novel I had been writing, The Splendid City, with the great Pablo Neruda as the main character. I am happy to say it was published last year to high praise.

This had been the territory I had occupied almost exclusively, by myself, for the previous several years. I sit at a round table in the bay window of the studio apartment that is my office. The windows give me views of the long, often sunny Russian Hill garden that my landlords maintain. It is very quiet here. There is a hum from the passing traffic on nearby Bay Street, but it is not particularly bothersome. I have a kitchen, a daybed, and a closet. Bookshelves. Bathroom. Art. Quiet.

I am alone for about seven hours a day.

Nowadays, those with whom I worked in those business offices are being required to do the same thing as I’ve been doing, and I am sure they are not prepared for it. Contemplation derives from silence. So, while they have been working in those offices, there has been little silence; thus, very little contemplation. Also, I hear them complain about how lonely it is at home, and how they can’t get any work done. My sense of it is that, in the past at the office, they have gotten a lot of work done, but that it has all been shallow. What they are suffering from, being sequestered, is the arrival of the need to consider their souls.  That’s tough duty for most business people, while it is grist for the mill among “real” writers. So, these only recently sequestered people are encountering issues that they have so far successfully avoided.

Themselves, for example.

Terence Clarke’s most recent novel, When Clara Was Twelve, was published on April 15.