Saturday night, and I was supposed to finish a Business worksheet on costs. Instead I opened the sketchbook that lives under my Maths folder, which is a bad filing system and an honest one. I drew a cup and a pear. Neither of them sat still in a useful way. The pear looks slightly insulted.
I have been thinking about price all month, because Chekhov would not get out of my head, and because IGCSE Business keeps asking what something costs. A drawing I make in an hour has a very clear cost: paper, a pencil that was already in the tin, and the worksheet I did not finish. It has no price. Nobody would pay me for this pear. A print in a shop window, of a pear that looks more like a pear, has a number stuck in the corner. The number is not the fruit. It is the permission to take the image home.
That gap is the part I like, and also the part that bothers me. In class we say price is what you pay and value is what you think you got. My sketch has value only to me, which sounds selfish until I remember that most of the music I love started as someone sitting in a room, making a version that was not for sale yet. The music box in June was the same idea, punched into card. The shop box next to it would have had a barcode.
I am not claiming the pear is art. It is a pear with a lopsided shadow. What I am claiming is that “worth nothing” is a market sentence, not a true one. Markets are useful. They tell you what other people will swap. They do not tell you whether the hour was wasted. If I had finished the worksheet, I would have a neater page and a less insulted piece of fruit. Both of those are kinds of production. Only one of them can go in a markbook.
Finance, the way I want to study it later, is supposed to be about allocating scarce things. Time is the scarcest thing I actually own. Tonight I allocated it to a drawing that will never be an asset. I can already hear the merchant in the play calling that vulgar in the opposite direction. I do not mind. I needed to see the cup become a set of lines before I could go back to the table of costs, which is also a set of lines, only less round.
The worksheet is still on the desk. I will do it. The pear can stay ugly. I like that it does not have a price tag. If it did, I would probably start drawing it to please the tag, and then it would not be my pear at all.