" There was suddenly a lot of talk of freedom, but I couldn't make much of this word freedom, which floated freely in all sorts of sentences. Freedom to travel? (But will we be able to afford it?) Or freedom of opinion? (But what if no one cares about my opinion?) Freedom to shop? (But what happens when we're finished shopping?) Freedom wasn't given freely, it came at a price, and the price was my entire life up to that point. The price was that everything that had been called the present until then was now called the past. "

― Jenny Erpenbeck , Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces