The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self

Furniture is solid. Furniture is dependable. Furniture is rarely changing. Furniture is the heavy things that hold down the corners of your life.

But when you live in another country, like me, and you’re never sure how long, exactly, you’ll be living in that country, like me, your relationship to heavy things changes. Maybe this is true if you’ve mo... See more

We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment.