Postal workers' passive revolt -- tradition

One of those minor news items caught my eye today.   It's a report about an "overwhelmed" postal worker in New York who just stashed bags of mail rather than delivering them.   He claims that he did deliver the "important" letters, but was simply too overwhelmed by the volume of other mail.

Investigators found mail dating back to 2005 in his home, car, and work locker.  Personally, I can sympathize with him.    Just having to empty my curbside mail box and tote all that junk mail (about 85% of my total) to the garbage can gets me down too.

But the story also reminded me whose good company this 2018 postal worker associates with in the history of the post office.   Almost 100 years ago, before William Faulkner wrote those gorgeous, complex novels that won for him the Nobel Prize in Literature, the struggling young writer had a part time job working in the campus post office of the University of Mississippi.

Part of the Faulkner folklore is that, working the night shift sorting mail, he would become bored -- or seized by the urge to write -- so he would just dump the rest of the mail in the trash.

When this was discovered, Faulkner was fired.   From such lack of responsibility, one might have predicted failure in life.    But that didn't reckon with this blazing talent that just couldn't be bothered with such trivial and vapid correspondence -- when he had Nobel Prize novels to write.

Not that I'm condoning irresponsibility, and the U.S. Mail has to be treated as sacrosanct.   But Faulkner was a poor choice for such a job.   He should have been fired.   As was inevitable, he found a way to write some of the world's all-time great literary novels:  The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom!, Absalom!   That's the top tier;  the second tier is also pretty great.  Even the few, less successful ones are better than most fiction.

Ralph