Elias Sassoon

The Diary of an Unemployed Gentleman Elias Sassoon

What do we have? Nonfiction? Fiction? Philosophy? Who cares! We do have a man of the 20th and 21st centuries attempting to jot down his daily thoughts. We have a mental diary, or, the diary of somebody who is mental; here, here thoughts of the mental (case), rather than thoughts of the actions of the mental (case). It's a diary of a neurotic, and the neurotic is one precisely because he's not a man of action, not a person of physicality, just one whose main exercise is conjecture, speculation, and obsessive questioning. He, I, is a sportsman of his own mind. Writing about the mental grind of being unemployed in an employed world. The job, having it, a must. The means of earning the paycheck; the means of socialization in group rituals. Unemployed and presently stuck in the suburbs existing beyond time - deserted streets, distant shopping malls, emptied homes. The individual isolated and growing out of touch and out of his mind; the mind retreating into the distant past and future.