Around that time my daughter and I had this exchange: Anne, imagine if the world had nothing in it. Do you mean nothing at all - just darkness - or a world without objects? I mean a world without things: no houses, chairs, or cars. A world with only people and trees and dirt. What do you think would happen? People would make things. We would make things with trees and dirt. ' When the cold comes, when our needs announce themselves, it is with clothing, with possessions, in literature, through dreams - in all the forms and categories that shape, contain and constrain - that we keep ourselves alive. Yet, in a society in which some are rich and some are poor, who gets to dream, and who invents our forms? This is a book made of money and the lack of money; of writing and of not-writing; of illness and of care; of low-rent apartments, cake-baking mothers, Socratic daughters and bodies that refuse to become information.
