Bellow’s moody philosophical character, Moses Herzog, thinks about the high-minded topics. He calls the soul an amphibian: “it lives in more elements than I will ever know; and I assume that in those remote stars, matter is in the making which will create stranger beings yet.” At home, deep in the heart of Texas, it’s well understood that the stars at night are big and bright. They make me wonder a bit too often if we’re really so different from the earth-substance that goes into those pennies. My heart may or may not be in San Francisco, but my soul is certainly in many places.

My soul is partly there at the end of a narrow spiral staircase in the back corner of the House library, aching over a paper on John Donne. In “A Valediction of Weeping” he writes:

Let me pour forth

My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here,

For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,

And by this mintage they are something worth

Pennies may be worthless on their own, especially in the machine of the economy. Alone they are no more special than something as coarse and quotidian as tears. We give things value by wedding them to our experience: with our words, our sighs, our stories. The French philosopher Alain Badiou explains (recently, in a fun video series!) that money has personal value only in the implied access it gives us to our various desires. He says that the limits of these desires are in turn related to the limits of our language. Among pens and pins and pennies, expanding our world is only about looking in the right places. On the tips of our tongues; in the palms of our hands. Quaerendo invenietis, so look sharp!

—Columnist David Grieder can be reached at davidgrieder@college.harvard.edu.