Walter Ripton Morris was fifty-four when he was fired from his job. The year was 1961, and the company for which he had worked for some time had been swallowed up by a bigger corporation who deemed him to be disposable. Four years later, Morris published the diary he had kept during the barren period that followed this blow—a revealing record of his daily struggles, the increasing frustrations, and the fruitless interviews in a job market unfriendly to his age. It was titled, “The Journal of a Discarded Man”. The following entry was written fourteen months down the line as Morris approached a second Christmas period unemployed.
The Diary Entry
11 December 1962, Tuesday
What I want is to be, to function, to produce—and still make money. I want to be carried away in this effort, so that time means nothing, so that morning, noon and night, holidays, lunch hours and coffee-breaks mean nothing. They mean nothing because you can take them as you please, not as they come up on a rigid schedule. If it’s flowing—and never mind what it is—you don’t stop just because the time happens to be twelve o’clock noon or five o’clock in the afternoon. You don’t stop because today is Columbus Day or Memorial Day or even New Year’s Day. You stop when it stops. It may stop at 10:30 on a Thursday morning. There is nothing awkward about that because you don’t have to go through the idiotic motions of seeming to be working until Friday at five… Thursday afternoon you take your wife to the movies and have cocktails at a nice spot afterwards. Friday you sleep until ten and then go down in your workshop and saw wood. It may not start up again until Sunday afternoon, and then it pours forth until two o’clock Monday morning. As you can see, these are not regular (read “respectable”) working hours. But it just doesn’t give a damn. Nor do I.
I don’t really want a nine-to-five desk job. That’s not functioning. But here I am, moving heaven and earth, to get one. So far, nobody wants to give me what I don’t want. They pick me over from stem to stern, though, as if they really had something to offer.
Further Reading
Walter Ripton Morris has the shallowest of footprints online. Very little biographical information can be found, and his books—three of which are published diaries—are difficult to track down:
- American in Search of a Way (1942)
- Notebook 2: Black River (1949)
- When You’ve Lost a Job After Forty: A Survival Manual (1964)
- The Journal of a Discarded Man (1965)
Diary entry excerpted from The Journal of a Discarded Man by Walter Morris. Published by Knabe-North in 1965.
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