A physicist of my acquaintance — I say “of my acquaintance,” though in truth I have not seen him since the centennial celebrations and suspect the acquaintance may have lapsed into something more closely resembling a mutual forgetting — once explained to me that friction is not, as I had assumed, merely a nuisance. It is, he said, what keeps us from sliding off the surface of the world. Without friction, nothing grips. Nothing holds. Nothing moves forward, because there is nothing to push against.
I have been thinking about this all week, which is perhaps not the best use of a columnist’s time, but then a columnist’s time is not a resource that anyone has ever described as scarce.
Consider the Copper Review Commission. On Monday, Ida Pryce and Aldric Voss will sit side by side in the Municipal Chamber and attempt to reach a joint recommendation on the most consequential fiscal question this city has faced in a generation. These two individuals agree on almost nothing. Pryce believes the tramway is Bobington’s future; Voss believes it is Bobington’s folly. Pryce sees investment; Voss sees debt. They share, as far as I can determine, a city of residence and a species, and very little else.
And yet I find myself cautiously hopeful about Monday — not despite their disagreement, but because of it. A commission of like-minded individuals would produce a report that confirmed what everyone already believed. A commission built on friction might, just possibly, produce something that survives contact with reality. Pryce will not allow the project to be killed. Voss will not allow the numbers to be ignored. Between them, pressed together under the force of a deadline, they may generate enough heat to forge an answer.
Or they may simply grind each other to powder. This is also a property of friction.
The same principle applies, I think, to the diplomatic stirrings on Chancery Row. I do not pretend to understand the subtleties of what transpired between Consul Lindqvist and the Foreign Office on Friday afternoon. My knowledge of international affairs is roughly equivalent to my knowledge of the internal workings of a pocket watch: I can observe that it appears to be functioning, I have a general sense that small things are moving inside, and I would not dream of opening the case.
But what interests me is the mechanism by which the Delvarian Empire moved from silence to speech. It was not, by all accounts, the result of persuasion or goodwill. It was the result of pressure — the Stormbreak detention, the shipping costs, the copper prices, the quiet accumulation of consequences that eventually made silence more expensive than conversation. The two nations did not agree to talk because they liked each other. They began to talk because not talking had become too costly.
This is friction at its most useful. It is not pleasant. It produces heat, noise, and occasionally sparks. But it is the thing that converts inertia into motion.
Even Blackshaw’s knee, in its modest way, illustrates the point. I am told by people who understand anatomy better than I do — which is nearly everyone, including my upholsterer — that a grade-one ligament strain heals through controlled stress. The knee must be tested, loaded, pushed to the boundary of discomfort and then, crucially, not beyond it. Too much rest and the joint stiffens. Too much force and it tears. The useful zone is the narrow one in between, where the fibres are challenged just enough to knit themselves back together.
On Friday, Blackshaw ran, jumped, tackled, and headed the ball at the Thornhill training ground. He did so, I imagine, with the full and exquisitely focused attention that one gives to a body part upon which one’s livelihood and a city’s sporting hopes simultaneously depend. He pushed the knee to the edge of what it could bear, and the knee held.
Saturday will be a different kind of test. Forty-eight thousand people, a survival match, Haverford’s defenders arriving with the explicit intention of running into him repeatedly for ninety minutes. This is not controlled stress. This is the real thing.
I spent Friday morning at Rensler’s, as is my custom. The coffee was four florins, the milk was present, and a man at the next table was reading this newspaper with an expression of concentrated dissatisfaction that I found oddly encouraging. (A reader who agrees with everything is either not paying attention or not reading a newspaper worth the name.)
Felix Rensler, who has become an inadvertent chronicler of the crisis through the medium of his prices, told me that business has been unusually good this week. “People come in to worry,” he said. “Worrying alone is unpleasant. Worrying with coffee is almost a hobby.”
I asked him whether he found the city’s current state of suspended agitation — the commission, the diplomat, the investigation, the match — stressful or stimulating. He considered this for a moment, in the way that barmen and coffee-house proprietors consider philosophical questions, which is to say, while polishing a glass.
“Both,” he said. “That’s the useful part.”
He is, I think, a natural physicist.