His Majesty is understood to want his Coronation to set the tone for a streamlined and modern monarchy, while retaining some of the pomp and majesty that stunned the world during the Queen's lying-in-state and funeral ceremonies. The service at Westminster Abbey next year will have fewer arcane rituals and be significantly shorter than the 1953 ceremony when Queen Elizabeth was crowned. They reflect a dream of attaining something perhaps ineffable or spiritual, something concerning autonomy or freedom from conventional structures of family and work.King Charles's cut-down Coronation is set to last little more than an hour, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. Could there really be something more important to us than economic success? These fugitive stories indicate that essential to humanity is a yearning for something more (or something less) than conventional prosperity. Melville closes his short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” with twin exclamations: “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” - as if all of us are summed up in the figure of this fabulous quitter.
Our long tradition of “ quit-lit” raises more universal questions: What are we humans here for, anyway? How are we supposed to be spending our time? But such are not the only, and possibly not even the greatest, American heroes. Of course there is also a plethora of Horatio Alger success stories featuring hard-working protagonists who pull themselves up by their bootstraps. What are we to make of all these escape artists populating our national literature? If literature represents the dream life of a people, then the American dream has been complicated from the beginning. Cormac McCarthy quietly quitting the literary spotlight. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield quitting all that is “phony.” Joseph Heller’s creatively passive Captain John Yossarian, who signs his letters “Washington Irving,” and occasionally “Irving Washington,” in his own tribute to the visionary father of American letters. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man quitting the demands of both the white world and a too-narrow Black identity. Zora Neale Hurston’s quitting the glamorous Harlem Renaissance scene in favor of her native Florida. The recluse Emily Dickinson quietly quitting the strictures of feminine respectability. Henry David Thoreau, who retreats to Walden Pond. We could go on: Huck Finn lighting out for the territories. “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off -then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” Ishmael’s amazing whaling voyage begins when, after so famously introducing himself, he explains the reasons he goes to sea: Bartleby’s mantra, “I would prefer not to,” is the clearest possible articulation of the quiet quitter’s credo. The Quiet Quitter Hall of Fame, if there were such a thing, would include many canonical American literary figures - among them, two of Herman Melville’s creations: “Bartleby the Scrivener” and the epic hero Ishmael, narrator of Moby-Dick.
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