“The core insight I received from my second reading of Office Politics was that, if I thought I could stand at one remove from my place of employment and regard it as a kind of diorama or spectacle, I was deluding myself. As Rilke wrote in a very different context, all this seems to require us. I had fallen into the quotidian and was going to have to work with the materials at hand, pedestrian and unpromising as they might seem, to make of my life and career something meaningful. This was no small gift of self-knowledge to receive from a novel.”
Office Politics
Wilfred Sheed
From the foreword by Gerald Howard
In William Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, the character Rosalind observes that Orlando, who has been running about in the woods carving her name on trees and hanging love poems on branches, “seems to have the quotidian of love upon him.” The Bard’s use doesn’t make it clear that quotidian comes from a Latin word, quotidie, which means “every day.” But as odd as it may seem, his use of quotidian is just a short semantic step away from the “daily” adjective sense. Some fevers come and go but occur daily; in medical use, these are called “quotidian fevers” or simply “quotidians.” Poor Orlando is afflicted with such a “fever” of love.