If Robbe-Grillet's fiction, with its timetables, careful inventories of things, and reports on arrivals and departures, owes anything to the traditional novel, it is to the detective story.
The files in there caused great convulsions when they were opened, after the Wall came down; people read about their own lives, as reported by the informants that turned out to be all around them — in their offices, their schools, their bedrooms; or inventories of things they themselves had told on others.
It all looks like an inventory of things you might find uplifting or beautiful.
I have been taking inventory of things that seem discordant although they might have been passable before Sept. 11.
He has been encouraged to go and make a "bucket list" – an inventory of things to do in his life.
They do not take an inventory of things that already exist; like God, they make reality up as they go along, ecstatically improvising.
Tom Ridge, the director of homeland security, said today at a White House briefing, "There is an inventory of things we believe we can give America to choose from to help us in this battle against terrorism".
Perhaps the commonest delusion in considering vocabularies is the assumption that the words of different languages, or at least their nouns, verbs, and adjectives, label the same inventory of things, processes, and qualities in the world but unfortunately label them with different labels from language to language.
"Being on the beach is infinitely more important than how done-up the inside of my house is, the arrangement and inventory of things inside," Adler says, as a bird comes in through an open window to eat the remains of a muffin.
There is the usual inventory of things I need to do, of course, but also less urgent lists, those of books to read or read again, music to find, plants to secure for the garden, and letters to be written (few of which will ever see the light of day).
Even if we only ever came to recognise the existence of one supervening entity would we not thereby have added at least one extra item to our inventory of things that exist?
