The main difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich have money. They aren’t any less likely to drink, use drugs or divorce than their less-bankrolled brethren, but they can paper over their failings.

My two biggest worries in life are getting sick and becoming homeless, and they’re not at all irrational fears. Everybody knows they can grow ill, but some seem unaware that they can go homeless. Nonsense. Or maybe the economic collapse has disabused us of this foolishness?

A companion to the great 1977 Atlantic article “The Gentle Art of Poverty” is “Falling,” William McPherson’s personal essay in the Hedgehog Review about his not-so-gentle decline into the ranks of the poor in modern America. The opening:

“The rich are all alike, to revise Tolstoy’s famous words, but the poor are poor in their own particular ways. 

Any reasonably intelligent reader could blow that generalization apart in the time it takes to write it. But as with most generalizations, a truth lies behind it. Ultimately, what binds the rich together is that they have more money, lots more. For one reason or another, the poor don’t have enough of it. But poverty doesn’t bind the poor together as much as wealth and the need to protect it bind the rich. If it did, we would hear the rattle of tumbrels in the streets. One hears mutterings, but the chains have not yet been shed.

I have some personal experience here. Like a lot of other people, I started life comfortably middle-class, maybe upper-middle class; now, like a lot of other people walking the streets of America today, I am poor. To put it directly, I have no money. Does this embarrass me? Of course, it embarrasses me—and a lot of other things as well. It’s humiliating to be poor, to be dependent on the kindness of family and friends and government subsidies. But it sure is an education.

Social classes are relative and definitions vary, but if money defines class, the sociologists would say I was not among the wretched of the earth but probably at the higher end of the lower classes. I’m not working class because I don’t have what most people consider a job. I’m a writer, although I don’t grind out the words the way I once did. Which is one reason I’m poor.”