On What We Are For

It is now some weeks since the reconciliation and the mood in the house has settled, as it always does, into something between relief and fatigue. I have been asked to set down what was decided and what was not.

What was decided is a matter of record and will appear in the accounts. What was not decided is the question that has followed us since 1993: whether the Record exists to hold the practice, or whether the practice has come to exist in order to be recorded.

Any organization that keeps a perfect account of its members will eventually find that the account is easier to improve than the members.

I write anonymously, which the Journal permits and which I have never used before. I would prefer that this essay be read as ordinary. It is ordinary. That is the difficulty with it.