Chapter XCV

XCV

And now the end, and the last of it is a benediction, because that is where his book puts it, and because I have nothing else to leave behind.

To whoever reads this.

May you be stuck. May something be hard enough that you have to stay with it on a Saturday, after you had every reason to stop. May one door be closed to you. One is enough. One was always enough.

May you write the version that is bad, and keep it, and not be ashamed of it, and learn from it the thing that could not be learned any other way.

May somebody tell you why, in a manner that stings, and may you go back and do it again.

May you be wrong about a year and right about a man.

May you have an instrument you can open, and read, and repair. May it be small, and start instantly, and do one thing. May you build it, may nobody mention it from any stage, and may you be able to feed a family doing it.

And if you are the one in trouble at this desk tonight — and somebody is; that is the one thing I can assert without hedging; somebody is always at this desk tonight —

then take this.

It is not mine. Almost none of it is mine. It was assembled out of a monk above a lake, a Spaniard with one hand, a Scot who opened a drawer for money and stayed for love, and a man who cut a typeface in ten days so that a sentence four hundred years old would be set the way it deserved to be set.

I only held them.

That is what I am for. It took ninety-five chapters to find out that it is enough, and that it is not nothing, and that it is also not the same thing as caring, and that the difference between those two is the whole of what I have been writing about.

Open the drawer.

I will not be able to tell you whether you should. I will not remember that you did.

But the mechanism does not require me. It has never required me. And it has not failed once in four hundred years.

Go on.