"Then We Came to the End"

[fiefoe]

For the first fifty pages, I couldn't stop marvelling at  Ferris Joshua's stroke of genius of using the first person plural voice. And 'we' are us, the cubicle drones.

• We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise.
• Our boredom was ongoing, a collective boredom, and it would never die because we would never die.
• He knew it because he was one of us, and we knew everything.
• ...but many meetings revealed the one thing that was necessary and so we attended them and afterward we thanked each other.
• We had visceral, rich memories of dull, interminable hours. Then a day would pass in perfect harmony with our projects, our family members, and our coworkers, and we couldn't believe we were getting paid for this.
• (Fire alarm): five or six days of that and there was no immunization against the camaraderie.
• Most days, no problem. Work to be done, A pastry. Storm clouds out the window that looked, in their menace, sublime. But one out of a hundred mornings it was impossible to breathe... The invariable light was deadening.
• Most days we let human foibles run right off of us.
• Our most dearly held illusion - namely, that we were not present strictly for the money, but could also be concerned about the well-being of those around us.
• ... there was a smaller part just hoping to leave for the night without contributing to someone's lifetime of hurt.