At the editorial offices they could tell that I was hanging around the corridors without purpose or goal. In principle it is accepted that when a correspondent returns from a bureau in the field he has no assignment or work for a certain time and becomes a fifth wheel to our long-suffering, dedicated team. But my alienated behavior and prolonged idleness had exceeded all the limits of tolerance, and Hofman decided to do something with me. Thus there was an attempt — one of a series in my life — to establish me behind a desk. My boss led me to a room containing a desk and a typist and said, "You're going to work here," I looked it over: the typist — yes, she was nice; the desk — abominable. It was one of those small desks, a mousetrap, which sit by the thousands in our cluttered and overcrowded offices. Behind such a desk, a man resembles an invalid in an orthopaedic brace. He cannot stand up normally to shake hands, but must first disengage himself delicately from his chair and cautiously rise, attending more to the desk than the visitor, as it takes only a nudge for this rickety, spindly-legged contraption to collapse with a roar on to the parquet. The seriousness of a whole office disintegrates into sniggering when instead of an official enthroned behind a monumental sculptured desk it sees a crouching, cramped wretch imprisoned in a miniature cut-rate snare. I cannot suffer a desk! I have never had a desk, and I have never joined in at meetings where people shout into each other's faces and jump down each other's throats with a desk between them. In general I am no enthusiast of furniture and regard as the ideal house the Japanese one in which there is nothing besides the walls, the ceiling, the floor and the ichiban. Furniture divides man from man; people cower behind furniture as though behind barricades; they disappear into furniture like birds into holes. If someone shows me a time-honoured antique and announces ceremoniously that it comes from this or that century and epitomizes such and such a style. I am unmoved. Nevertheless, I understand the utilitarian value of furniture, the need for it, its awkward if practical vocation in the interest of human comfort. This tolerance of mine extends to all furniture except the desk. Upon the desk, I have declared a silent war. It is, after all, a specific piece of furniture with particular properties. While many whole categories of furniture may be man's serviceable instruments, his slaves, in the case of the desk a contrary relationship obtains: man is its instrument, its slave. Many thinkers worry over the progressive bureaucratization of the world and the social threat of its terror. Yet they forget that these very bureaucrats are themselves terrorized, and that they are terrorized by their desks. Once plunked down behind one, a man will never learn to tear himself free. The loss of his desk will strike him as a natural disaster, a catastrophe, a fall into the abyss. Notice how many people commit suicide at their desks, how many are carried straight from their desks to psychiatric hospitals, how many suffer their heart attacks behind desks. Whoever sits down behind a desk begins to think differently; his vision of the world and his hierarchy of values change. From then on he will divide humanity into those who have desks and those who do not, and into significant owners of desks and insignificant ones. He will now see his life as a frenzied progress from small desk to a larger one, from a low desk to a higher one, from a narrow desk to a wider desk. Once ensconced behind a desk he masters a distinct language and knows things — even if yesterday, deskless, he knew nothing. I have lost many friends for reasons of desks. Once they were truly close friends. I cannot say what demon it is that slumbers in a man and makes him talk differently once he's set behind a desk. Our symmetrical, brotherly relations fall apart; there arises a troublesome and asymmetrical division into higher and lower, a pecking order that makes us both feel uncomfortable, and there is no way to reverse the process. I can tell that the desk already has him in its clutches, in a full nelson. After a few experiments I give up and quit calling. Both of us, I think, accept the outcome with relief. From then on I have known that whenever one of my friends starts achieving ever more showy desks, he is lost to me. I avoid him to spare myself the lurch that marks every transition from symmetry to asymmetry in human relationships. Sometimes a man will get up from behind his desk to walk down and talk with you at the other end of his office, in a couple of armchairs or at a round table. Such a person knows what desks are and knows that a chat between people divided by one is like a discussion between a sergeant perched in the turret of a tank and a raw frightened recruit standing at attention and looking right into the barrel of a big gun.
So even if the desk my editor had placed me behind had an inlaid mother-of-pearl top, I had to get out. The desk after all, has one more dangerous property: it can serve as an instrument of self-justification. I sense this in moments of crisis, when I can't get anything down on paper. Then a thought pushes into my mind: Hide behind the desk. I'm not writing because I've got something important to think about. What's writing? Writing doesn't mean anything. We are absolved; the desk makes up for everything; it compensates.