Becoming Montaigne 4: Value
In Montaigne’s day, a tale is told of a hungry porter who holds his bread over a cook’s spit to smoke it in the fumes of a roasting goose. When the porter is finished eating his bread, the cook demands payment for the goose smoke. The porter refuses to pay on the grounds that the smoke was escaping into the air and didn't technically belong to the cook.
Among the crowd that gathers to watch the ensuing dispute is a famous fool whose great-grandfather was once a royal jester. The cook and porter eventually agree to abide by the fool’s judgment of their case. After thinking for a while, the fool borrows a coin from the porter and throws it down on a table, causing it to ring out. He hands the coin back to the porter and informs the cook that the sound of a coin is fair payment for the smell of a burning goose.
One summer long ago, a kid in our neighborhood discovers that the pop machine at a downtown motel accepts metal slugs in lieu of dimes. We decide as a group that it’s our duty to capitalize on this priceless gift, at least until the man from the vending machine company notices slugs in his coin chute and puts an end to our bonanza.
Do we worry that the man from the vending machine company is being nickeled and dimed by his pop machine’s lackadaisical approach to coin recognition?
No.
Do we realize that we are part of an international criminal network of counterfeit coin users that continues to this day, and that section 14-90 of the statutes of the city of Norfolk, Nebraska, for example, states that “A person commits the offense of unlawfully using slugs, if he makes, uses, or utters a slug or slugs with intent to deprive a supplier of property or service sold or offered by means of a coin machine or with knowledge that he is facilitating such a deprivation by another person”?
No again.
To our young minds, which don’t understand private property unless it has a chain link fence around it, a defective pop machine is goose smoke for the taking.
Montaigne says a prominent ancient Greek politician once condemned a fellow Athenian who sold burial products, on the grounds that his quest for greater profits meant more people would have to die.
“This condemnation seems to be a misunderstanding, since no profit is ever made other than at the expense of others, and you would have to condemn all earnings as thievery. The birth, development and increase of each thing corresponds to the alteration and corruption of another.”
As if to illustrate Montaigne's point, the defective pop machine is taken out of service and starts its new life as scrap metal in a fenced yard by the lake.
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