Bartleby of Fencing

A Story by Abishai100

Portrait of an eccentric 'man-of-Earth' whose encounters/ideations cast him as a 'pseudo-philosopher' of world expressions.

A modern adaptation of Bartleby, the Scrivener (Herman Melville).

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Bartleby got around town in his nice and convenient white scooter and liked to think of himself as an isolationist scholar of random trivia and knowledge on the challenging Planet Earth and was a secret member of the Porcellian cyber-chess society in New England and struck his peers/acquaintances as an eccentric man of efficient if eccentric machinery and IQ. This is his unusual tale.

BARTLEBY: I've read good books, especially at Dartmouth; I consider me versed in world-chess/IQ and paced with humanity.

Things changed for Bartleby, an Algerian-American princely-inheritor of fortunes, who lived in New England and consulted with Interpol-relation regarding blood-diamond motions/smuggling chess-stalemates on the continent stemming from Africa, when he wasn't reading or scooter-riding or going to the book-shop or engaging with Porcellian-chess activities. He always kept to himself 'emotionally' until this change came, in the form of a very unusually beautiful woman named Shelbye who happened to offer the wandering stranger human a romantic proposal, finding him an intriguing visitor to the book-shop whom she noticed would take 'photography' arts images of customers for his cyber-posts about existential sanity during his off-work time at home.

SHELBYE: I've shared Bartleby's photos and persona-impression with my girlfriend; she agrees I've met a 'stranger' genius.

BARTLEBY: Me thinks to buy Shelbye, a divorcee with a young boy (Damian), a baseball-figurine chess-set for Xmas this year!

Versed in some pretty iconic works, Bartleby the scrivener liked to think about the ways the philosophy gleaned from his readings/education informed his albeit Catholic-convert Western-world 'sense' of complete human existential walking sanity and wondered what this strange-change in his life, concerning the insisting romantic woman Shelbye, would offer his 'determined' mind of isolationist optimism and first reciprocated her approaches with simple statements like, "This moment between us reminds me of an excerpt from a reading from Dartmouth, which goes the way of the following life-philosophy/dream suggestion, Shelbye, and it is this..."

SHELBYE: This stranger person has crafted me (and Damian) an Xmas-consumerism parody 'avatar' for personality-chess talk.

The more Shelbye thought of Bartleby the scrivener, the more she thought that the reason he was such an eccentric 'man-of-chess' on Earth was his 'incomplete' sense of self-absorbed somewhat child-like but pseudo-romantic hermit-like emotional humility. In fact, she wanted to share his Selfie on social-media with her girlfriend whom she was certain would be fascinated by Bartleby's love of microwave-quiche and share this 'stranger' ideation with her friends.

BARTLEBY: Me thinks to get a 'cool' GI-Joe comic book/issue for Shelbye's inquisitive son (Damian) for New Year's!

Bartleby was engaged through the Porcellian (Dartmouth) by a group claiming it was a Martian union seeking to challenge the scrivener in a special cyber-chess stalemate condition, to which Bartleby replied with eerie coldness, "I'll just use my rook-bishop to leverage your likely queen-knight advance for diagonal-board expression (to warrant a 'complete' sovereignty compact for your 'machinery' now)."

What set Bartleby apart was not his 'uncanny' if secret gift with chess-stalemate IQ but his stranger gift, a special sports-market media-treasure, a post-team transfer QB-athlete (star) Upper Deck Cunningham Viking piece which he explained to Damian (Shelbye's inquisitive boy!) was a 'diamond' for capitalism-chess for its symbolic casting of sports-market as 'expression' of pure human race Ego.

DAMIAN: Wow!

"'Ah, humanity!'... 'Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance'...'I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best'” (Melville -- Bartleby, the Scrivener).