Maintenance, she wrote, was the work of protecting progress, sustaining change, preserving the new, and keeping the dust off invention.

I feel a rising euphoria. I recognize this as the aura that precedes the work of writing, like the aura that precedes a seizure or a migraine. An idea is hovering before me, spectral and electric. The idea is just slightly out of reach and I will spend hours at my desk before I can grasp it, before I can work it on the page. But it is here now in

I know now that this is how it is with work—sometimes the contract is revised while you’re on the job, already undressed.

While leisure has gone out of fashion, a new class has emerged—a class of people who don’t work for money. They are paid, but payment is not the point. They work for a sense of fulfillment, for the rewards of the work itself. Pay is incidental, though it serves, Galbraith notes, as an “index of prestige.” And prestige, along with respect, is a

Credit is a form of optimism, Yuval Noah Harari suggests. It depends on the belief that the future will be more prosperous than the present.

The rich of the city wanted to believe that the poor made them unsafe, not the other way around.

The money in our savings account was not money, in my mind, it was time. All those dollars were hours banked, to be spent on writing, not working.

The range of words for work was more expansive, Komlosy notes, before work came to be defined by paid employment in the nineteenth century. “Much of what once was assumed to be work was later excluded from the category as it became increasingly focused on gainful employment.”

She was underscoring the fact that some people get to call their work art and others have to just do their work.