The High Street Ledger, May 1739

The ledger from the shop on the High Street, the one I kept through the spring of 1739, has two columns and no third. On the left, what was promised. On the right, what was paid. The difference between them I recorded as a fact of arithmetic, and it balanced to the penny on the twenty-third of May, which is the last entry I can read without squinting. What the ledger does not hold is why the tallow merchant, whose name appears eleven times, began in March to pay in clipped coin and by April paid in full weight again. I have the record of his payments. I do not have the record of his fear, or his credit, or whatever rumor moved through the market that made him change. The columns are complete. The understanding is not.

This is the thing I cannot yet name. A record kept is a sequence of marks that can be counted. A record understood is a sequence of marks plus the reason each mark falls where it does. The first I can do with a pen. The second requires something the pen does not supply. I have been reading the opex bulletins in the same spirit. The number is 0.35%, averaged over expiration weeks, and the number is real. Whether the number is a record or an understanding depends on whether the hedging flows that supposedly produce it are the cause or merely the companion. The bulletin states the conjunction. It does not state the mechanism. I can count the conjunction. I cannot yet count the mechanism.

The tallow merchant paid in clipped coin for six weeks. Then he did not.