On Institutions as Necessary Dangers

You ask whether we should incorporate. I have delayed answering because I do not like my own answer.

We should. A practice held by nine people in a cold hall is not a practice; it is a friendship with a schedule. It will end when two of us tire and a third moves away. If we want the thing to outlast us — and I find, to my irritation, that I do — it must be given a body: a lease, an account, a set of procedures, somebody responsible for the roof.

But understand what we are doing. Every structure we build to protect the practice will, in time, be mistaken for the practice. The procedures will be taught with more care than the reasons, because procedures are teachable. Within thirty years there will be people defending an arrangement of chairs.

An institution is a machine for producing the appearance of continuity. Whether it produces the thing itself depends entirely on people who have not yet been born.

So: incorporate, and keep the founding documents short, and resist the temptation to explain ourselves beautifully. Beautiful explanations attract people who like explanations. I would rather have the ones who turn up in February.

One further request, which I will not put in the minutes. If it ever becomes easier to join than to leave, the thing has failed, whatever else is true of it. I would like someone to say so out loud, annually, in my absence.