Thomas Edison: A Private Life

1931, West Orange, New Jersey

The house has been arranged into stages of decline by people who prefer management to understanding, and because management is what remains easiest to them they keep altering surfaces as if surfaces were the cause, lowering voices, shifting papers, softening lamps, reducing movement in corridors, all of which they interpret as care and I interpret, not unfairly I think, as a practical confession that the old system is now expected to finish by administrative means rather than by its own momentum. Nursing is the enemy of work. I have tolerated the nurses, the folded towels, the trays removed before I have entirely finished with them, the small conferences outside doors, because resistance to every local adjustment would itself become waste, but I do not mistake these accommodations for truth. The truth is that the work remains distributed through systems still operating beyond these walls while the body that first forced much of it into regular production has become a reluctant instrument, breath shortened, legs slower, hearing more distant than ever, and this discrepancy between a public world still lit and sounding by methods I made practical and a private room increasingly ruled by others’ interpretations is precisely why I write. If I do not, then biography will do what biography always does when the subject has been used too successfully, namely preserve the devices, sentimentalise the effort, and discard the method as if method were merely the dust left after genius has passed through.