monetary viscosity.

the glass in a medieval cathedral is technically a liquid. nobody mentions this because it ruins the experience, but it is: glass has no crystalline structure, just amorphous silicon dioxide arranged like an extraordinarily slow river that’s been moving for a thousand years, thick at the bottom because gravity kept pulling while the bishop kept praying and the tourists kept photographing something they were certain was solid.

you wouldn’t know it by looking. it’s a fact about physical matter, and it matters here because the thing we call money has the same property: it can appear to be moving without actually moving, it can record a transaction and satisfy every counter in the eccles building, and still be as frozen as the bottom inch of a stained glass window in chartres.