Money

Money doesn't mean that much to me, it never has.

Just that I have enough not to think about it most of the time like I used to in the old days when I had so little I had to think about it almost all the time, which made me unhappy.

I'm happy now with 5 twenties wrapped around a credit card I know won't be rejected, bound with one of those green metal clasp office manager's buy by the box at Office Max.

This is not to say that I haven't known many people who never have enough money no matter how much they have--and some of them have plenty--and never will.

In her admirable book, "The Relentless Revolution," Joyce Appleby presents capitalism as a culture, with a logical historical development, one of the most potent creations of mankind. Capitalism is the foundation of the liberal democratic world we now live in, the one that's trying so hard to make us all the same wherever we live. It's a system so successful we don't have to think about it; I can be in Rome or Melbourne or Kyoto or wherever and be assured that not only will everything be about the same as it is at home (if that's what I want) but I have access to the money necessary to make it be the same if that's what I want.

One can have mixed feelings about capitalism and still be a capitalist; socialism tolerates no such thing.

"Money too is a kind of poetry," Wallace Stevens wrote somewhere, a phrase I read years ago in one of his poems or essays that's stayed in my head ever since. It's a very clever observation, it doesn't say money can make one happy or unhappy but that it can give pleasure the way poetry gives pleasure, whether it's tragic or comic or lyric.

Having money looks better to one's self and to others than not having money. Just look at the way the stools are lined up in the men's locker room at the Olympic Club, San Francisco, the polished gleam of the wood, the pattern of the carpet. Yet with or without money, unhappiness is the closest some of us ever come to life.