At once, a great marble statue of an Angel startled me. I came round out of the door and almost ran smack into it. It was one of those Angels that used to stand inside church doors, offering holy water in half shells. I had seen them in Europe and in New Orleans. It gigantic, and its cruel profile stared blindly into the shadows. This Angel was poised as if he had just landed from the skies to offer his sacred basin. This monstrous Angelic being of black granite actually resembled more a Mesopotamian demon than an Angel. God, he loved it. He loved it and he was acting stupid. I mean, there could have been one of his enemies here. But then why would a gangster or a federal investigator come bearing a gift such as that? He was thinking only about it, the fine carving, that it was recent, not ancient, for obvious stylistic reasons, seventeenth century perhaps, a fleshed-out rendering of a fallen Angel. Fallen Angel. He did everything but step on tiptoe and kiss the thing. He put his left hand up and ran it all over the granite face and the granite hair. Damn, I could not see it! Hoe could he put up with this darkness? It was almost erotic the way he studied it. Fearlessly he stood back, having forgotten any threat of any kind, and looked at this new acquisition. Where had it come from? Whom? He did not give a damn about the price. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9

Happy families are all alike. Whether this true of great corporations I do not know, because I have belonged to only one. The company I have been with for more than three years is one of the World’s largest, having some thirty-four thousand employees in the United States of America and overseas. There are more than five hundred of us here at headquarters—and we are a happy family. I say this without irony, not for the reason that I am in the public relations department, but because it is the truth. We give very appearances of happiness. We are also in many respects pretty much alike, at least on the surface. It is not that our company makes us believe in a certain way. That kind of thing is out of date. Most of our people tend to live and talk alike, and think along the same general lines, for the simple reason that the company treats us so well. Life is good, life is gentle. Barring a deep depression or war, we need never worry about money again. We will never have to go job-hunting again. We may get ahead at different speeds, and some will climb a bit higher than others, but whatever happens the future is as secure as it can be. And the test is not arduous. Unless for some obscure reason we choose to escape back into your anxious World (where the competition is so hard and pitiless and your ego is constantly under attack) we will each enjoy a comfortable journey to what our house organ calls “green pastures,” which is, of course, retirement. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9

“Is this sort of existence worth living?” you ask. I think that depends on who you are and also on the person you could become. There are two ways of looking at it: (1) If you are not going to set the World on fire anyway, it is better to spend your life in nice surroundings; looking back, if the big company had not made things soft for you, you might have had a more adventuresome time and struggled harder to make your mark in the World. However, it is all too easy to be glib in disapproving of the kindly corporation. We are then in the position of scorning the Earthly paradise, and that cannot be done lightly. To be honest, we should put aside the convenient clichés—that big business firms, for example, are by their very nature heartless, exploitive, enforcers of conformity, and so forth. It is commonly assumed that a big, apparently impersonal authority is made up of bad fellows. How much more bewildering and exasperating to discover that they are good fellows! I went into my job at the corporation with a poor spirit. I was suspicious of large companies, and swore that nobody was going to turn me into a robot. My situation was untenable anyway. I had just sold my first novel, a satire about a man, who under pressure of business, had turned himself into a Nothing. In a year the grenade would go off, and of course the writer would be fired. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9

Particularly disconcerting in the early days was the gentleness of my new associates. Most public-relations offices are filled with edgy, hustling people. Here there was such a courtesy and regard for your comfort…it was unfair. When I arrived, everyone turned and smiled, and they all came over to say how glad they were that I was with them. The boss took my arm and had me in for a long talk. “We want you to be happy here,” he said earnestly. “Is there anything we can do? Please let us know.” When you discover that the members of the company team really care about you it is a shock to the nervous system. The skeptical newcomer stands there, shifting his feet not knowing what to do with his preconceived resentment. I went through the orientation course, and completed all the forms and saw that I was protected against everything. I had a momentary fearful sensation of being enfolded in the wings of the corporation and borne aloft. “How’s everything going?” inquired one of the orientation men, and I grunted at his civil question. Now I was one of the group, hunched gloomily over a typewriter amid smiling faces. With the exception of the department head and assistant manager, our public-relations staff worked in one large room. We did our jobs in leisurely fashion with a carpet of non-glare fluorescent lighting above and a thick wall-to-wall carpet below. The usual offices noises were hushed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9

Typewriters made a faint clack. Our mild jokes were lost in the air. It seemed to me a strange pressure chamber in which there was no pressure. This was a temporary arrangement. Next year the company was moving to a new office building in the suburbs, and it would be a fabulous place—a great office-palace on a hilltop surrounded by fields and woodlands. Everybody talked about the palace and what a marvelous headquarters it would be. The enthusiasm bored me, and I thought: “Well, I will never see it.” That was a long time ago. Today I continue to live in the city but commute in reverse to the suburbs, and every weekday I sit down to work in the country palace. Here, after three years, are some general impressions of our corporate life: The corporation is decent. Most of our being have deep, comfortable voices. You have stood beside them in slow elevators, and heard these vibrant tones of people whose throats are utterly relaxed. And why should not they be relaxed? Once you join our company, so far as the job is concerned, you will have to create your own anxieties. The company would not provide any for you. There is no getting around it—our working conditions are sensational. The lower and middle echelons arrive at nine and, except in very rare instances, go home at a quarter-to-five. Many of the higher executives work longer and harder, according to their inclinations, but seldom in response to an emergency. Rather it is a pleasure for them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9

This is a company whose products move easily in great packages across the continent. Demand is constant and growing, since our products are good for people and contribute to the nation’s health and well-being. The supply is adjusted from time to time in order to keep prices at a reasonable level. There is no reason for anyone to kill oneself though overwork. The savage, messianic executive of the type would find himself or herself out of place here. In fact, one would be embarrassing. In the unlikely event of one coming with us, the moment he started shouting at anybody one would be taken aside and admonished in a nice way. (We do have one high-ranking officer a bit like than, but he is old and close to retirement. He is very much the exception.) A full recital of our employee benefits would—and does, in the indoctrination period—take all day, but here are just a few of them. We have a fine pension fund, a fantastically inexpensive medical program for you and your family, and a low-premium life-insurance policy for double your salary. The company will invest five percent of your pay in blue-chip stocks and contribute on your behalf another three percent. The company picks up half of your luncheon check. When you moved to the suburbs, the company paid its employees’ moving expenses and helped them settle in their new Cresleigh Homes. For those who did not wish to move…a bus waits at the railroad station for commuters from the city ad drives them to the hilltop office building. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9

The only unsatisfactory working condition, I think, is that you must be content with a two-week vacation until you have been with the company for ten years. In other words the experience you may have gained elsewhere, precisely the experience the company has bought, counts for nothing in terms of vacation time. However, this policy is fairly standard practice. It certainly inhibits a being’s desire (say, after nine years) to change companies for a better job. Thus, it is at least a minor pressure against free-spirited enterprise. All the benefits exert pressure, too. There is nothing sinister about them, since admittedly they are for your own material comfort—and is that not supposed to be one of the goals of humankind? What happens is that, as the years go by, the temptation to strike out on your own or take another job becomes less and less. Gradually you become accustomed to the Utopian drift. Soon another inhibition may make you even more amenable. If you have been in easy circumstances for a number of years, you feel that you are out of shape. Even in younger beings the hard muscle of ambition tends to go slack, and you hesitate to take a chance in the jungle again. On top of all this, it is practically impossible to be fired. Unless you drink to alcoholism or someone finds your hand in the cash box, the company can afford to keep you around indefinitely. Occasionally under great provocation—such as a scandal that reaches the tabloids—there may be a transfer. Once in a while a prematurely crusty old-timer is retired. Otherwise the ax will not fall. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9

Every so often I hear my seniors at the corporation inveigh against socialism, and it seems strange. I think that our company resembles nothing so much as a private socialist system. We are taken care of from our children’s cradles to our own graves. We move with carefully graduated rank, station, and salary through the decades. By what marvelous process of self-deception we consider our individual enterprise to be private? The truth is that we work communally. In our daily work most of us have not made an important decision in years, expect in consultation with others. Undertaking an activity about which we feel anxiety produces a feeling of strain, fatigue or exhaustion. One patient of mine, for example, who was recovering from a fear of walking on the street but still had a good deal of anxiety on that score, felt completely exhausted when she took a walk on Sundays. That is this exhaustion was not due to any physical weakness is shown by the fact that she could perform strenuous housework without the slightest fatigue. It was the anxiety bound up with walking outdoors that caused the exhaustion; the anxiety was diminished enough so that she could walk outdoors, but was still effective enough to exhaust her. Many difficulties commonly ascribed to overwork are in reality caused not by the work itself but by anxiety about the work or about relations with colleagues. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9

Anxiety connected with a certain activity will result in an impairment of that function. If there is, for example, an anxiety connected with giving orders, they will be given in an apologetic, ineffectual manner. Anxiety about riding a horse will result in an inability to master the animal. The degree of awareness varies. A person may be aware that anxiety prevents one from performing tasks in a satisfactory way, or one may only have the feeling that one is unable to do anything well. Membership in a group, be it a vastly spread religion or a small minor sect, gives each member a feeling correctness in their joint beliefs; each supports the others. However, when some drastic and unexpressed event may prove hard to bear, this may begin to weaken. The first thing we notice in a creative act is that it is an encounter. Artists encounter the landscape they propose to paint—they look at it, observe it from this angle and that. They are, as we say, absorbed in it. In essence: Come, let us reason together. You mistakes; all come short. Come unto me and repent. I will remember the sin no more. You can be whole again. I have a work for you to do. Christ makes wool white. “Be it according to the will of the Lord. But, behold, our work is not finished; therefore they burn us not,” reports Alma 14.13. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9