1You have heard of a desk sent down a canal by night, among hens and herring. Now hear plainly what was in it.
2The star-readers had shown that the Weave has laws, the same on earth and in the sky. A grinder of glass asked the next question. If the law is one, and the stuff is one, where is the outside? He looked for it honestly, as far up and as far down as glass can reach. He found no wall.
3This is the eighth rung. Atar is the Whole. There is not the world, and then beside it a maker of the world. There is one thing, and it is everything, and that is what the old names for God were reaching toward. The stars are in it, and the salt, and you.
4Some who first heard this thought it a theft. They thought the sacred had been taken out of the world. Look again. Nothing was taken out. It was found to be everywhere. The ground you stand on is not outside the holy place. There is no outside.
5And see what follows, for the grinder laid down only the first page, and others walked the road.
6If there is one Whole, then no one stands nearer to it than another. There is no blood that is more of it and no blood that is less. Each person is the Whole, come to a point, looking out through one pair of eyes. Each carries the Fire you learned of in the fourth book, and it is the same Fire: in a marquise and in a smith's son, in a boy below the deck and in a girl on a landing.
7So every person's ways are sacred. They are not sacred because a king grants it or a law allows it. They are sacred because the Open that lies before one person is a part of the Open of the Whole, and whoever shuts it has shut a piece of everything.
8And so no one may own another. Not by purchase, not by birth, not by marriage, not by a debt, not by being stronger. A thing has a price. A person has none, for there is nothing that can be laid in the other pan of the scale. To use a person only as a tool is to treat a fire as if it were a stick.
9This is not a new law added to the First Principle. It is the First Principle, seen from close by. You were told that a Closing is whatever shuts the ways of those it touches. To own a person is to take every one of their ways at a single stroke and add them to your own. It is the Closing nearest to killing.
10See also how the earlier rungs are gathered up here.
11You learned in the first book that the future is real. The painter who carried the desk to the barge held a door open for readers who would not be born for a hundred years.
12You learned in the third that a lie is the first Closing. An old father told one small lie to spare his dead son, and a city built a murder on it. And a man was offered a thousand florins to tell a lie with his whole body each Sabbath, and would not.
13You learned in the fifth of the Near Hand and the Far Hand. A key in a painter's pocket taught it again. The mob was not his to move. The book was.
14You learned in the sixth of the One Hearth. In this book you have seen why the hearth is one. It is one because the house is.
15Now hear the practice. It concerns freedom and fairness, which are two faces of one coin: freedom is the keeping of your own ways, and fairness is the keeping of another's.
16First, for your own freedom: learn what is just enough. The grinder pushed two hundred florins back across the table. He did not do it because money is foul. He did it because he had reckoned what he needed, and he knew that whatever he held above that, he would begin to fear for. Every fear is a handle by which you may be led. Find out how little you need to be yourself. Then you will know what can be taken from you without harm, and you will be hard to buy.
17Rule yourself, and seek rule over no one else. This is all the power a free person needs, and it is the only kind that does not shrink the Whole. If you find that you wish to command another's thoughts, their going out and their coming in, look to it. Something in you is afraid.
18Second, for fairness: look for the wall. When you are about to give someone less than you would give yourself, less hearing, less trust, less pay, less patience, stop and look for the wall between you. Ask what it is made of. A different tongue? A different skin? A different way of praying? Being a woman, being young, being poor, being born on another man's land? Look as the girl looked through the glass at the flea and at the moon. You will find the same house on both sides. If you cannot find the wall, do not act as though it were there.
19Divide the pot, and give away the half with more in it. It is a small thing, and so it can be done every day. When you share out work, or food, or praise, or blame, and it is your hand that does the dividing, let the other choose first, or choose for them as you would wish it chosen for you. Fairness is not a feeling. It is a way of cutting bread.
20Keep your promise to the one who cannot make you keep it. A merchant promised freedom to a slave. No court on that island would have held him to it. That was the whole test. Your word to the powerful is prudence. Your word to the powerless is what you are.
21Do not take a plain person's lamp. The grinder knew more than his landlady. When she asked whether her faith was good, he told her that it was, if she lived in it peaceably and kindly, and he meant it. To be free in your own mind gives you no right to tear at another's. Offer what you have seen to those who ask. Light your candle beside theirs. A truth that is forced on a person is one more master.
22Know that there are two fires, and judge which the hour needs. One friend printed everything in the common tongue and was rasped to death. One wrote in Latin, sealed his letters with the words Take care, and lived to finish. Do not scorn either. There are days for the torch and days for the banked coal. When you must choose, ask this: which will leave more doors standing ten years from now? And if you choose to wait, see that you are waiting, and not hiding.
23When the wrong is done to a stranger, feel for the rope. An old man thought he had earned his garden. Then he learned that a draper had been broken in a square far away, and he found that the garden had no wall on that side. You cannot answer every cry. But you can take up the one that has come to your gate, and ask the questions the judges did not ask, and write the letters. Three years of one person's evenings were enough to make a kingdom look at what it had done.
24And each night, before you sleep, you may ask yourself three things.
25Whom did I use today as a tool only, and forget that a fire was looking out at me?
26Whose door did I hold the key to, and what did I do with it?
27What did I say, or leave unsaid, because I feared what I might lose?
28Do not ask these to punish yourself. Ask them as the grinder held a lens to the window: to see whether it is true yet, and where to press tomorrow.
29You will not be paid for any of this. He was not. He had a room, a lathe, and a cough, and he was more free than the Elector who offered him a chair. The freedom was the payment. Those who shut him out stood afterward in a smaller house. That was all that befell them, and it was enough.
30All things excellent are difficult, he wrote, and rare. Then be one of the rare ones. The road is open, and it is not long. It begins at the place where you stop looking for the outside.
31May your ways stay open. And theirs, and those to come.
32This is the fire. Carry it.