The Wit’s Guide to Quitting

Or, the quit’s guide to witting

Peacing Out After The Ball, by Ramon Casas, 1899

Who among us hasn’t indulged in a fantasy of quitting? As one cowboy asked another in Brokeback Mountain, “I wish I could quit. You?”

How satisfying it would be to finally tell everyone what you really think of them, emptying out an artillery’s worth of barbed comments on your confused colleagues, giving them what for, telling your boss (played in tonight’s production by the late Dabney Coleman) what he can go and do, rhetorically burning the place to the ground. And I never liked Stacey from accounting either!

And then they ask, who was that? 

“Doctors think a lot of patients are cured who have simply quit in disgust”
— Don Herold

Far more diabolical to follow the example of Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville’s cipher who torments the world with four simple words: I would prefer not to. This inscrutable insubordination can’t be parsed by his employers. He’s unfailingly polite and direct, and when asked to explain himself, he would prefer not to.

“I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in new opposite, to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my own,” his boss recalled. “But indeed I might as well have essayed to strike fire with my knuckles against a bit of Windsor soap.” 

This is worth saving for your exit interview. It may also be a higher truth. Why do we ever quit anything? “We would prefer not to” may not be a satisfying explanation, but that doesn’t make it false.

“There is an old motto that runs, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.’ This is nonsense. It ought to read — ‘If at first you don’t succeed, quit, quit at once.’”
— Stephen Leacock

The writer Geoff Dyer has proudly made a career of only ever doing what he wants, a strategy he discovered after being fired from a job he barely remembered having. “I’ve adopted a policy of quitting, of getting by without persevering,” he explains. “As soon as I get fed up, bored, tired or weary of anything I abandon it. Books, films, writing assignments, relationships — I just give up on them.”

But then he admits to the problem with such exquisite dedication: “Is it possible to live entirely without perseverance? I think it is, as long as one perseveres with the idea of doing so.”

“Some of us might find happiness if we would quit struggling so desperately for it.”
— William Feather

Adding to the chorus of voices begging you to throw in that towel already is Rusty Foster, author of Today in Tabs, accurately described as your favorite newsletter’s favorite newsletter. 

“You can always quit!” was his advice to a struggling writer who feared leaving a dead-end job, on the logic that “In fact if you’re thinking ‘I can’t quit’ that’s basically proof that you must quit.” And also: “Every morning when you get out of bed think about how you’re one day closer to death and do the thing you know you want to do.” 

Rusty made “You Can Always Quit” swag, and as of next week, he’s quitting Today in Tabs for the remainder of 2024 to hike the Appalachian Trail with his son. He’s writing a separate newsletter about it (Today in Trail, can’t hardly wait), so is it really quitting? I could come up with a few more lines about that, but I would prefer not to.

“Many a patient, after countless sessions, has quit therapy because he could detect no perceptible improvement in his shrink’s condition.”
— Brendan Francis

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ReccoMention 

Each week my paying subscribers (C$30/yr!) receive a separate endorsement of a witty work, and we’re currently working our way through gems of the reference shelf. This week’s edition introduces what might be the last book of quotations any major press will ever publish. Ominous? Not really. But worth your time!

Riposte Card 

Those subscribers who pony up just a bit more dough (C$80/yr) and share their postal address are rewarded each month with a limited-edition illustrated quip created by a new wonderful artist every 30 days. This month’s elaborates on my nagging suspicion that one day we will all die, but does so in a very jaunty fashion so it’s appropriate and perhaps even necessary to put it on your fridge.

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Quote Vote

“Most of the pictures they make nowadays are loaded down with special effects. I couldn’t do that. I quit smoking because I couldn't reload my Zippo.”
— Billy Wilder

Every week you tell me where we go next, and for me it’s just the right amount of predetermination. But hey: Write in your candidate in the comments below and I’ll put it in next week’s Quote Vote!

Get Wit Quick No. 255 could also be titled Things We Think But Do Actually Say, as per Jerry Maguire. I was impressed to learn that director Cameron Crowe actually wrote that movie’s 25-page mission statement, but not quite enough to read it all. This newsletter is a continuation of my manifesto Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting, delivered to everyone at the office so long as they opted in. Should you quit? Follow your ❤️, up to a point.