Always fooling with something

On week ends in summer the town empties. I visit my office on a Saturday afternoon. No phone rings, no one feeds the hungry in-baskets, no one disturbs the papers; it is a building of the dead, a time of awesome suspension. The whole city is honeycombed  with abandoned cells--a jail that has been effectively broken. Occasionally from somewhere in the building a night bell rings, summoning the elevator--a special fire-alarm rings. This is the pit of loneliness, in an office on a summer Saturday. I stand at the window and look down at the batteries and batteries of offices across the way, recalling how the thing looks in winter twilight when everything is going full blast, every cell lighted, and how you can see in pantomine the puppets fumbling with their slips of paper (but you don't hear the rustle), see them pick up their phone (but you don't hear the ring), see the noiseless, ceaseless moving about of so many passers of pieces of paper: New York, the capital of memoranda, in touch with Calcutta, in touch with Reykjavik, and always fooling with something.


--E. B. White