Chapter One: The Furnishing of the Hall

On the wall of every examination hall there is a small notice with two lines on it: what may be brought in, and what may not. A blue pen, a ruler, a simple calculator. The candidate reads the notice once on the first day and then forgets it, because his eye is taken up with the paper.

In the greater hall there is another notice, longer and more exact. Money on it is a permitted tool, and health is a permitted tool, and children, and a house, and standing among men, and your lifetime itself. All of them are allowed; the candidate was not barred from them and was not stripped of them. But at the foot of the notice there is a line in small print that only an unhurried man reads: the tools are handed in with the paper. That is, what is in your hands is not only help towards the examination; it is one of the questions.

Look at these four: a lifetime is a tool, knowledge is a tool, money is a tool, and the body is a tool. There is no rebuke in the question for having been given them; it is a request to know where they were spent. The hall is furnished for you, and the question is about the furnishing, not about the walls.

This whole part is about that line in small print: how to hold a permitted tool with a hand that does not stick to it. A chapter on the furnishing of the hall and how it is to be read, a chapter on the two papers with no third, and a chapter on five actions carried out by the clock and not by intention alone.

The earthly hall is not a neutral room with bare walls. It is fitted out on purpose and with care: polished desks, a window looking onto a garden, a gilded clock above the board, and seats, some of them cushioned and some of them hard. Every piece of this furniture is placed by calculation, not to rest the candidate and not to tire him, but to show what he is. The fitting-out is itself examination material: whoever is taken up with the shine of the desk instead of the paper has answered, and whoever looks out of the window at the garden for a whole hour has answered, even if he never wrote a letter.

The verse counts the tools out one by one, the way they are counted in a handover record: women and sons, heaped-up gold and silver, branded horses, cattle and tilled land. Then it does not stop at the count; it moves the eye on to what is better than that with God. And this is exactly where the examination lies: not that the candidate should turn away from the desk and sit on the floor, and not that he should worship the desk and forget the paper, but that he should know the rank of each thing.

The trap that most of those sitting there fall into is that they are satisfied with looking at the surface of the hall and its glitter, and treat the seats and the fittings as a permanent resting place, a home never to be left. The alert and sensible candidate goes with the compass of his faith into the inside of the hall and what it really is; he knows in his heart and by his certainty that this furnishing is a temporary means of testing, that the whole house is a place to cross and not a place to settle in, a stage of a journey and not a home.

The verse sets the stages of a life out in a row, the way an invigilator sets papers out on his desk, then gives the likeness of rain whose growth pleases the farmers, then turns yellow, then becomes broken straw. There is nothing in this to put you off planting; it is a setting of the clock: that you should know which hour of the examination you are sitting in.

Here the two ends meet in one pattern: water came down, the plants of the earth mixed with it, then it became dry stalks that the winds scatter; then wealth and sons are called by their true name: the furnishing of the life of this world. It was not said that they are evil, and it was not said that they are the goal. It was said: a furnishing. And the furnishing in an examination hall is what draws the eye away from the paper.

So God's gaze does not fall on the furniture. Whoever has understood this is relieved of a heavy sickness that ruins the people of examination halls: measuring himself by his neighbour's seat. And from here grows an inward immunity against sinking into soft material rivalry: no envy, because the tools are not prizes; no boasting, because they will be collected at the door; no selfishness, because the time is one and the paper is one.

And there is a difference between two men: one holds the pen to write, the other holds it to show people its colour. The pen is one; the difference is in the hand. So too, money in the hand of a man who spends it is not the money in the hand of a man who counts it, and health in the body of a man who stands up with it is not the health in the body of a man who sleeps on it. The tool is not called to account; the holding is.