Read "The Longest Journey" by E.M. Forster online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The soul has her own currency. She mints her spiritual coinage and stamps it with the image of some beloved face. With it she pays her debts, with it she reckons, saying, "This man has worth, this man is worthless. " And in time she forgets its origin; it seems to her to be a thing unalterable, divine. But the soul can also have her bankruptcies.
Perhaps she will be the richer in the end. In her agony she learns to reckon clearly. Fair as the coin may have been, it was not accurate; and though she knew it not, there were treasures that it could not buy. The face, however beloved, was mortal, and as liable as the soul herself to err. We do but shift responsibility by making a standard of the dead.