WE LIVE IN A TIME of furniture without memories. Toni Morrison, in her novel The Bluest Eye (1970), describes this as “certainly no memories to be cherished.” Silent witnesses, our furnishings can evoke inarticulable yet visceral reactions: Take the sofa that arrived damaged, which one still pays for monthly, whose “joylessness stank,” to borrow Morrison’s words, is “pervading everything.” This object bears haunted traces of the indescribable circumstances surrounding our condition. Perhaps the truths of our existence lie furtively between