You have reached the end of the book, and so there is only one thing left to say, and it is said to you directly.
If the argument of these pages found you and held you — if somewhere in the reading the conviction stopped being ours and became yours — then understand what that means. It means you were not, in the end, a reader of this book. You were one of the people it was written to find.
There is a generation that founds a nation, and there is no other moment like it in that nation's whole existence. Every citizen who comes after will inherit something already standing — the institutions built, the Registry filled, the Convokes recurring, the path worn. Only the first ones inherit nothing and build everything. Only they get to decide, by what they do, what the nation will permanently be. That generation is forming now, in the small number of people across the world who are reading these final words at something close to the same time, and feeling something close to the same thing.
We cannot promise that generation an easy road. We have been honest, in this book, that the road is long, that it is sequenced, that the early Volumes are the unglamorous ones, and that a nation is earned rather than declared. We do not soften that now. What we promise instead is that the work is real, that the thing being built is worth a life's portion of devotion, and that the people building it beside you will be the people most worth knowing in the whole of the culture.
So here is the charge, and it is small enough to carry and large enough to live by.
Steward what you love, rather than merely consuming it. Recognize the remarkable, and refuse the empty, and know the difference. Keep faith with the canon you inherited, and add to it, and hand it forward in better condition than it reached you. Receive the newcomer the way you would have wished to be received. Hold the standard when holding it is inconvenient. And remember, in the long and ordinary stretches of the work, that you are not maintaining a hobby — you are building a nation, and a nation is built only by people who decided that the building was theirs to do.
The remarkable automobile gave us something. It gave us beauty, and freedom, and the people we became at the wheel. This nation is how we give it back. Not to the cars alone, but to everyone who will come after us and deserve to inherit the culture whole.
The founding documents are signed. The argument is made. The hand is extended.
What remains is you, and the road, and the work.
Drive well. Build well. And when you meet another who carries the same conviction, you will both already know the words.
Live and Drive to Thrill.
