Performance review

11 March 2014

The Single Individual

'My sorrow is my castle,' you said, Built like an eagle’s nest upon the peak of a mountain,A mountain lost in the clouds.'Always inside your cabinalways beside yourselfwriting the wordsof a widowed soulexpensively tailored suits, cigars, top hats, dyed hair…all disappearedafter the surprise of 'an indescribable joy'wearing only black nowlike a mourner camouflaged in the night:bent over the pagein the flickering candlelighttrembling with fearthat time has run out. Above your desk, still hanging on the wall a fading Bucket List that begins, from the top: 1. To believe. 2. To dig down beyond the foundations, and put the question-marks there. 3. To repent. 4. To recover that word, ancient and buried whose dead letters are never spoken or heard a word silent and unknown: ineffable, incomprehensibleheretofore mispronounced and poorly translatedmuffled by the bustle of the streetsto redeem it and finally utter it, with parrhesiafor 'purity of heart is to will one thing,' you often saidto beget a single new word, the password,that makes life worth dying forfor you know well that even Godhas only one Word to say, the Only-begotten, before all agesthrough whom all things were made,one word only to rescue from oblivion.'But,' you asked,What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding?'

Note:The poem refers to Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Passages in quotation marks are from Kierkegaard’s works; 'an indescribable joy' is from a journal entry on his conversion experience of 1838.

Performance Review

After being shown in by the girly secretary into his spacious office

you were invited to sit in a corner chairfrom where you stared at his polished black shoesand his new brown cardigan.For some reason he kept talking excitedly,not about your recent abysmal performance(which you feared would result in a stern warning at least, or perhaps a cut in wages, if not outright dismissal)but about his injury playing sport with his kids yesterdayand the disruption this may cause to his upcoming vacationwith his wife to Barbados.And you could see the whole family huddled togetherwithin the picture frame on his deskand you could see him returning home this afternoongreeted with kiss and hug from wife and daughter as soon as he came through the doorthen heading to the backyard to play ball with his sonuntil his wife calls them in for roast chicken(you could almost smell the lemon and herbs)then he takes

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