“There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same.  They are there and yet not there: tangible gluts, condemned to survive in a world they no longer belong to. What  is one to think, for example, of a closetful  of clothes waiting silently to be worn again by a man who will not be coming back to open the door ?[…]Suddenly revealing things that no one wants to see, that no one wants to know. In all of this there is violence, and also some sort of horror. Things don’t mean anything in themselves, like the kitchen utensils of a missing civilization; and yet they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself; whether to dye your hair or not, whether to wear one or the other shirt, whether to live or die. And the futility of it all when death comes » Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude