The Thing Itself [antikvár]

Foreword THIS BOOK BEGAN with a simple feeling, the sense that my life, and much of the life about me, was not "real." The quotation marks insist upon themselves because of course my life is real, and so is yours. The world around us is real too, all of it. They are building a Comfort Inn in the cornfield. The corn and the field are real, and so is the Comfort Inn. It is a real motel. The woman on the television who speaks with emphases that would make you think her mad if she were actually in the room ("Thirty-/ive iragis died ")—she is real, a real anchor. Her colleague ("What have you done with that sunshine. Chuck?") is a real meteorologist, or at least a weatherman. My automated reservations clerk, Juhe, is a real thing of its or her kind. 1 do not have a Second Life, but if 1 did my avatar would be a real avatar. Nonetheless things start to add up—an infinity of little oddities and disjunctions and . . . disappointments that conspire to make me think there is a scrim between