On: Iran war: Brent oil briefly hits $119 as talks stall

July 15, 1854

The news of the day speaks of a war in Persia, of a strait blockaded, and of oil priced at one hundred and nineteen dollars. They have put a number to the cost of this conflict: twenty-five thousand millions. A sum so vast it becomes an abstraction, a noise in the ledger of nations. I walked to the pond this morning and considered the cost of my own existence. My house cost me twenty-eight dollars and twelve-and-a-half cents. My bean-field, for which I traded the sweat of my brow and the strength of my arms, yields a harvest I can measure in bushels. I know its true cost. But what is the cost of twenty-five thousand millions? It is the life of every man who must labor to produce that sum, it is the forests felled for its ships, the fields scorched by its passage. It is paid not in treasury notes, but in years and peace and quiet mornings.

They fight over a strait, a narrow passage for tankers, while the wider passage of the sun across the sky goes unremarked. The price of Brent crude soars, and men will speak of markets and supply. I look at the oil in my lamp, bought with the labor of a half-day’s work, and I know its precise value: so many hours of my one life exchanged for this many evenings of light by which to read or write. Their war is a monstrous engine of complication, demanding this fuel, requiring that price, justifying this blockade. Simplify, simplify. The essential fact is this: men are trading their lives - their only, irreplaceable lives - for the privilege of contention over a channel of salt water. The pond this evening is still. It asks for nothing, and reflects everything.