Futility

John Updike captured the stubborn futility of hanging onto our stuff in his short story, “The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe”—he calls it “thrift’s absurd inertia.”

I looked up the word futility in my grandmother’s 1938 multivolume set of The Universal Dictionary of the English Language (I keep this set in one of three bookcases I own that will have to go when we eventually downsize; two of which I absolutely will not part with.) In simple language, it is hard for some of us to throw t...