I went to see Ursula LeGuin at Powell's Books, near the end of her life, and she talked a bit about a group she'd joined for writing poetry. She read a poem she'd written about an old wooden mixing spoon.
It reminded me of the bit in Left Hand of Darkness, where Estraven and Genly Ai feel sad at giving up the stove they'd depended upon in crossing the ice sheet.
Like, there's the way we go on about technology, an alienated thing, that oddly displaces how creating and using tools is a part of being human, that we actually have relationships with our tools that are quite different from the thing we criticize as reification.
