Money burns like tinder, flows off like water.
As for government promises, the wind is steadier. It is only too easy to conceive that a bomb that could destroy all traces of places as we know them, in life and through books, could also destroy all feelings as we know them, so irretrievably and so happily are recognition, memory, history, valor, love, all the instincts of poetry and praise, worship and endeavor, bound up in place. For Welty, an apocalypse that destroys place would destroy story as well. For Erdrich, though, that apocalypse has already occurred. And in this, there always remains the land.