M Train

Smith describes her daily habit at a small Greenwich Village café: black coffee, brown toast, olive oil, always the same corner table. It establishes the book's method — thinking through small unbroken routines — and previews a real loss, since Café ’Ino closed for good in 2013.

Smith surveys her mementos, her devotion to television detective series, and an invitation to address a society devoted to the polar scientist Alfred Wegener. Her mind moves associatively between the trivial and the profound, introducing the continental-drift motif — slow, invisible change — that recurs.

Triggered by a line from a Davy Crockett film, Smith recalls being told as a child she'd never amount to “a hill of beans.” Decades later she stands in a grocery aisle cataloguing bean varieties, trying literally to price the phrase — a small, comic meditation on how memory holds the unresolved.

Recounts Smith's early marriage to Fred “Sonic” Smith in Detroit — a bar with a clock stripped of its hands, Fred's pursuit of a pilot's license. Their shared life is framed as governed by a private clock; after his death, she reads that discipline of shared time as a kind of miracle.

Centers on Smith's absorption in Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, especially its symbolic well, which she treats as a real destination reached by thinking your way in — tying reading-as-pilgrimage to the book's claim that imagined and physical travel carry equal weight.

Named for the Puccini aria about an old coat, the chapter follows the black overcoat Smith receives on her fifty-seventh birthday, which becomes inseparable from her solitary rounds. It braids opera, ritual, and object into a meditation on devotion and impermanence — and its eventual loss echoes in the book's final line.

Titled after the Zen term for negation used in koan practice, this chapter follows Smith's pilgrimage to Japan. It makes explicit the philosophy announced in the opening line about “writing about nothing,” tying travel, reading obsession, and Buddhist thought into one argument about productive absence.

Smith travels to Larache, Morocco, to Jean Genet's grave, depositing stones carried since a visit to the penal site Genet wrote about. She recalls meeting Paul Bowles in Tangier, framing pilgrimage to dead writers as a recurring form of conversation and repayment.

The closing chapter weighs what Smith does and doesn't believe in, against Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. She commits to continued writing, closing the arc from ritual and grief to a stated intention to keep working — ending on the aria/requiem line that names the coat and the café.