Passing Through

The Desk recalls Kafka’s Castle: one cannot be certain where it begins, where it ends. Is the case of Shasta Lo-Cal Tiki Punch Soda on the desk, orisiton the pile of records on the pile of books on the pile of Sunday newspapers on the conjectural floor?

Examined cautiously, The Desk reveals itself to be indeed a desk—call it the ur-desk—supplemented, buttressed, by long temporary tables of the kind offered by E-Z Rent-Alls, and some fiberboard shipping cartons, and stacks of this and that; the whole concatenation covered by a metastasizing strew of copy paper, books, clippings, books, magazines, books, and empty red-white- and-green de Nobilis cigar packets that cascades here and there to the floor and laps at the walls. Somewhere is the gate to the space warp via which this mass of printed paper extends the eighty or so miles to the sub-Desk at national review in New York.

CS

About the Author

C. H. Simonds

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National Review

Conservatism

William F. Buckley Jr.

The Desk recalls Kafka’s Castle: one cannot be certain where it begins, where it ends. Is the case of Shasta Lo-Cal Tiki Punch Soda on the desk, orisiton the pile of records on the pile of books on the pile of Sunday newspapers on the conjectural floor?

Examined cautiously, The Desk reveals itself to be indeed a desk—call it the ur-desk—supplemented, buttressed, by long temporary tables of the kind offered by E-Z Rent-Alls, and some fiberboard shipping cartons, and stacks of this and that; the whole concatenation covered by a metastasizing strew of copy paper, books, clippings, books, magazines, books, and empty red-white- and-green de Nobilis cigar packets that cascades here and there to the floor and laps at the walls. Somewhere is the gate to the space warp via which this mass of printed paper extends the eighty or so miles to the sub-Desk at national review in New York.