"The procedure, or the appointment — none of us seem to want to say the word death — has been moved from Thursday morning to the early afternoon."

"Another lifetime of waiting. By 9 a.m., the clouds have broken, and my mother is already dressed, her hair in curlers. She is sitting on the bed, looking at her computer. My sister and I suggest a walk. My mother declines: 'I’m doing emails. Just unsubscribing from Politico.' 'Mom!' We splutter. 'We can do that! It’s your last day on earth!' Which it is, and so we desist. Around noon, we go down to the hotel bar. My mother orders a whiskey-soda, ice cream, and a glass of Barolo. She enjoys the wine so much that I suggest she could just not go through with it and stay in this exact hotel and drink herself into oblivion for the rest of her life. Like Bartleby, she’d prefer not to."

From "The Last Thing My Mother Wanted/Healthy at age 74, she decided there was nothing on earth still keeping her here, not even us" (NY Magazine)(the mother opts for assisted suicide, available in Switzerland)("She had a three-pronged rationale... The world was going to hell, and she did not want to see more; she did not get joy out of the everyday pleasures of life or her relationships; and she did not want to face the degradations of aging").

I don't think I'd ever seen Bartleby used in the context of suicide, but here's a 2011 New Yorker column by Ian Crouch, "Bartleby and Social Media: I Would Prefer Not To":

[W]ho’s looking out for the introverts, the misanthropes, or the outcasts? Finally, there is an answer: GroupMeh, which bills itself as “a revolutionary, game-changing social network for the tragically apathetic.”...

The New Yorker has a link for GroupMeh, but I'm not passing it along, because at the moment it goes to a Japanese porn site. I guess the meh folks got tired of performative tiredness.

The interjection “meh”...  hasn’t made it into Webster’s or the O.E.D., but other dictionaries have brought it into the fold. It’s a ideal world [sic] for these ironic times....

Are we still having ironic times? Irony passed, didn't it? It rarely seemed worth the effort to vouch for the sincerity of anything. I was struck this morning to see "earnest" modifying "utopian vision" to describe a nitwit art project.

Anyway, these days, "meh" has made it into the OED, where the supportive quotes include "While this seems like an also-ran collection... even meh Picasso is better than a lot of the stuff out there."

The New Yorker piece continues:

My pending application [to GroupMeh] got me thinking about great instances of meh in literature. Before I got bored... I’d come up with Melville’s inscrutable ginger-nut eating scrivener in “Bartleby,” a key touchstone in the grand tradition of office-work existentialism in American culture.... When the lawyer asks him to perform a new task, Bartleby’s industriousness quickly gives way to... a mysterious siren call for disgruntled employees everywhere: “I would prefer not to.” The formal language of his refusal might seem strange today. A twenty-first-century Bartleby would probably take one earbud out, look up at his boss, and just say: “Meh.” Later, when the lawyer tried to placate him with an idea for a new job as a bartender, the oft-refusing Bartleby goes further in establishing his meh bona fides: “I would not like it at all; though, as I said before, I am not particular.” Apathy muddled by strong opinion and obstinacy, the scrivener would fit right in among my generation, posting weary outrage in comments sections.

Over to you, comments section.