There is a table in the house where you grew up. The book began with that table. I want you to return to it now, before I let you go.

You have read fourteen chapters since the table. Some of what was in those chapters you already knew, in some form, before you began. Some of it gave names for things you had been carrying without a name. Some of it asked you to look at things you would have preferred not to look at. The whole of it has been an extended argument that the work of becoming a person worth being, and the work of being part of a people worth being part of, is the same work conducted at different scales, and that the work is done, where it is done, in the small daily choices of the unremarked days, by people whose names will mostly not be remembered, in places whose particular character will not survive past a generation or two of those who knew them, on behalf of consequences they will not live to see.

The work will not be finished in our generation, and will not be in any.

I want to be careful about how I say this. There is a tone in which this kind of statement gets made that I want to avoid. The tone treats the unfinished character of the work as a counsel of detachment, as if the work being unfinishable were a reason not to take its current state too seriously. That tone is both misleading and if you heed it, deprive you of the meaning of a life well lived. The work being unfinishable is the structural condition of being a generation, and the generations that have done their work best have all known this and have continued to work anyway. The unfinishability is not an excuse. The unfinishability is the situation. Within the situation, the question is what each generation does with what it has been given, and what it adds to what it will hand on. The question is consequential, because the answers each generation gives have consequences that the next generations will live inside.

You have been given a great deal. The fields you are eating from were cleared by hands you will never know. The wells you are drinking from were dug by labour you cannot trace. The institutions that have made your life liveable were built across long stretches of time by people whose contributions to them are now invisible to almost everyone, and whose names appear, if anywhere, only in records no one reads. You did not earn what you have inherited. You owe a debt to the chain that came before you, and the debt cannot be paid back to those who built up the principal, because they are no longer here. The debt can only be paid forward to those who will come after you, in the form of an inheritance somewhat richer than the one you would have left if you had not paid the debt at all.

Most of what the paying-forward looks like, in any single life, is small. The patient daily care for the people who are close to you. The honesty in the work you do, even when no one is checking. The willingness to keep the saying and the deeply felt and the doing of your own life in alignment, in the small matters that no one will register and that, accumulated across years, become the kind of person you are. The friendships in which the difficult things have been said. The participation in the small institutions of your community. The refusal to participate in the small daily corruptions that the surrounding culture has stopped naming as corruptions. The teaching, by example more than by instruction, of the children who are around you — your own, if you have any, and other people's, if you have time for them. The honesty about your own country that the rest of this book has been asking you to develop.

None of this is the kind of work that produces visible results in any individual life. The visible results of any individual life, looked at narrowly, are small. The chain, however, is not the sum of individual lives looked at narrowly. The chain is the long accumulation of small daily work, conducted by many people across many generations, and the chain produces results that no individual contributor could have predicted or claimed. The harvests we have eaten were planted by people who did not live to see them. The harvests our great-grandchildren will eat will be planted by us, in the daily work we are doing now, whose results will be invisible to us across the time we have.

There is a temptation to want more than this. The temptation is to want to know that what one is doing matters, in a way that can be verified within one's own life, by visible results that one can point to as evidence of one's contribution. The temptation is not contemptible. It is deeply and characteristically human. But the temptation, if indulged, will become a compelling enough reason not to do the work, because the work, in most cases, will not satisfy it.

The work satisfies a different criterion. The work is what one does because of who one has become, not because of what one expects to see. The doing of it is its own evidence that one is the kind of person who does it. The results, where the results come, come into the lives of people whose names one will not know and whose faces one will not see. That is the structure of the situation and that structure is not modifiable. The work either gets done within the structure or it does not get done.

I want to say one thing more, before I let you go, about the chain itself. The chain has, in every generation, been carried by people doing what they could, where they were. Some of them have been people of great visibility, whose names have come down to us as the names of the figures history itself cannot forget. But most of them have been people of no visibility at all, whose contributions to the chain are completely invisible to anyone reading the histories, and whose existence we know about only because we know, by structural inference, that the visible figures could not have done what they did without the support of vast networks of less visible people without whom the visible figures would have had no platform on which to stand. The invisible ones are most of what the chain is. The visible ones are the surface of something whose mass is mostly below the surface, and the mass is what holds the surface up.

You and I are, almost certainly, among the invisible ones. But do not make the mistake of considering that a diminishment. The invisible ones are most of what the chain is. The invisible ones are most of who have carried the chain forward in every generation that has carried it forward. In fact, the invisible ones are what allows there to be a chain at all. Your participation in the work is the work. It does not need to be visible to be the work. The work, conducted in your own life with the patient daily attention this book has been asking you to give it, is your contribution to the chain. The contribution will go forward from you in ways you will not see. It will lodge in the people around you, and in the children who are watching you whether or not you are aware that they are watching you, and it will, in some measure, become part of what they carry forward when their turn comes. That is the structure of what you are part of. That is the place you have in it.

The table in the house where you grew up is still there, in some form, in your memory at least. The people around it are some of them gone now, and some of them will be gone before you are. What was passed to you at the table is in you, transformed by what you have done with it. What you will pass to the table where you sit now, or the table where you will sit, is being prepared, every day, in what you are doing with what you have been given. The work begins again every morning. There is no day on which the work is finished. There is also no day on which it is too late to begin.

That is the whole of what I have to say to you. The rest is yours.