I must go the long way around to these thoughts, because the shortcut leaves out too many distinctions that have to be made. So these are the aspects of acquiring and keeping material possessions in this life that we will stipulate are (1) unworthy and (2) not what we are talking about, anyway: greed and miserliness and ostentation and competitiveness and materialism and mindless consumption and personal vanity and social climbing and decadence and deranged, shameful values. Not to mention theft. I hope that covers it, but add anything comparable you like; consult Dickens and the Bible and Tom Wolfe if you need help.

I also acknowledge that you can find yourself in thrall to your possessions, a morally deadening fate. in some ways I envy the carefree young creature I once was, who moved all of her worldly belongings from one modest Greenwich Village dwelling to another in two load-ups of a borrowed baby buggy. But most young people are like that. The true liberation only occurs when you have a weight of accumulated possessions to be liberated from. You don’t need to be an ascetic or a saint Who renounces all earthly goods to achieve such liberation. But at some level of your being you must be able sincerely to pronounce these things to yourself less important than the loves and friendships and values that matter in your life. Sentimentally put, but nonetheless true: sacrifice, heroism, restraint and moral behavior all rest on the validity of this undertaking. It is, of course, widely dishonored–if it is even thought of–in much of our society, and not just in the obvious enclaves of the very rich and famous. it happens equally in this city where commandeered, temporary acquisitions can become an obsession.

But there is another human and humanizing aspect to our regard for our possessions, and this is the one that interests me. We are as a species, after all, distinguished by our babit of getting and keeping and handing objects on, as well as our more or less unique ability to do so. With the upright stance came the freeing up of the hands (equipped with a powerful grip) to carry things back to the cave, and before long Homo sapiens was well on his way to becoming Homo shopping bag. Yes, magpies gather and your 8-year-old spaniel has a chewed-up, old squeaky toy that seems indispensable to his continuing existence, and some animals create definable families. But none builds as we do or creates totems as we do. And none constructs a psychological safe haven out of familiar (from the same root as “family”) possessions passed on from generation to generation. These and also certain things acquired in one’s own lifetime that speak of this dear friend or that remarkable episode or some other hilarious or trying passage become the markers of our history and our identity as it has evolved.

When you look at people on TV who have suddenly been deprived of all that, you are seeing something very different from some miscreant losing wealth in bankruptcy proceedings. You are seeing people losing what is often an essential element in their own comfort with and understanding of who they are, their groundedness. even their personal pride. Whenever would-be public money-savers talk about making people on welfare dispose of their assets before they quality for grants, there are always some–happily the law has held them at bay so far–who would continue the stripping right down to the last nonessential household item of value, the picture, the teapot and so on. To do so of course would surely be to guarantee that they would have less inclination and incentive to get off the rolls. For what the Draconians recommend is taking away whatever they have brought from an earlier better life, providers of continuity and dignity and remembrance of family and roots. Insurance can never cover the loss experienced by so many of those whose ordeals we have been witnessing lately. And for the poor as well as the rich these things matter well beyond their simple cash value. I think that for all of us who have been transfixed spectators at so many calamities of dispossession, there is no more poignant object than the bundle even the most destitute carry with them. What is in it that they so value. having lost all? What would you save from a fire, we ask each other. Almost no one responds in terms of monetary value.

Dispossession and displacement are not just freak effects of storms or arson. Our times have been characterized by the uprooting of populations, those waves of refugees and economically destitute immigrants surging from place to place. These are persons whose homes and possessions and, in a way, history have been taken away–destroyed or overrun or simply eroded by misfortune into nonexistence. You see them on the road, often clinging to possessions that never seem too heavy to bear no matter how weakened these people may be. One of the great problems the world is going to face is the desperation and loss of grounding of these populations, the fatalism that follows obliteration of those possessions that helped define their lives and their relationships to each other and their past. Shelter–soulless. square public housing of some kind–does not compensate for this loss. It is it long way from Malibu to Sarajevo or Sudan. But you can see some of the same expressions on the faces of people in all those places who have lost what is, for them, everything. The travails of the rich can get you thinking about the poor.