An Audit of the Soul
They put a figure on the good, and the figure was small
In a season of , the Committee resolved to economise, and, finding the furniture already immaterial, turned to the one asset it had never costed: the conscience.
The Treasurer explained that everything of value must appear on a balance sheet, and that the soul, being widely praised, was surely an asset of some worth.
An external auditor was engaged to assess, quantify, and where possible the moral holdings of each member.
He arrived with a clipboard, a calculator, and the serene lack of imagination that the work required.
Conscience, he ruled, would be measured in units of , and carried on the books at cost, less accumulated compromise.
Councillor Adeyemi declared her conscience priceless, and was gently informed that priceless, for accounting purposes, is entered as zero.
The auditor interviewed each member, asking what they would not do for money, and recording, with a small sigh, how briefly they hesitated.
Prewitt's conscience was valued at four pounds and a promise, the promise being deemed non-recoverable and written off at once.
The Chair's proved larger but heavily , pledged years ago against a favour no one could now recall.
It emerged that most consciences had been quietly remortgaged, their owners having borrowed against them so often that little remained.
The grand total, when the auditor tallied the moral wealth of the entire Committee, came to rather less than the cost of the tea.
This finding was received not with shame but with relief, for a cheap conscience, the Treasurer noted, is inexpensive to maintain.
It was moved that the soul, being a depreciating asset, be sold off before it lost the little value it retained.
An amendment cautioned that selling one's conscience twice, though tempting, tended to complicate the audit.
I recorded the proceedings faithfully, and felt my own moral holdings quietly revalue themselves downward as I wrote.
The auditor recommended that the Committee its conscience entirely to a firm specialising in ethics, thereby removing it from the balance sheet.
The firm, when contacted, replied that it had recently disposed of its own conscience during a restructuring, and could offer only a testimonial.
The Chair observed, with the gravity the subject demanded, that we had at last put a figure on the good, and the figure was small.
What the poets had called beyond price turned out, on inspection, to be simply beneath notice.
The citizen's pavement was assessed too, and valued higher than the assembled souls that had failed, for six years, to repair it.
This comparison was struck from the record as needlessly exact.
I noted in the margin that a thing becomes cheap the moment you agree to price it, and that some values survive only by refusing the .
The auditor, his work complete, submitted an invoice larger than the entire moral worth he had been hired to .
He was paid promptly, from a budget that had, mysteriously, always contained room for such things.
As he left, he remarked that ours was a healthy organisation, having so little conscience left to lose.
The Committee thanked him, and resolved, in the interest of , never to acquire any more.
Thus the audit closed a modest : we had balanced the books at last, by valuing our souls at exactly what we were prepared to pay to keep them.