A Tapestry

“How young is too young to begin to discover the power and the beauty of words?” Louis L’Amour answers his self-posed question time and again in The Lonesome Gods. Such discovery, he asserts, has no beginning. Nor has it an end. L’Amour’s bold assertion is that learning is eternal. Further reading exposes his demand that each be responsible for his own education. Thus The Lonesome Gods awakens in us a sense of tradition—a continuous thread, unbroken, keeping the tapestry of time from unraveling. What the past understood, L’Amour desires us to foster; for without nurture, it will fray. Each generation is called to keep it vibrant and whole, then to add its own unique hue to the tapestry.
L’Amour’s favored character, Johannes Verne, lost his mother at age five and his father at seven. Many would declare he had not enough time with his parents to learn much. Yet Johannes reveals as a teenager, “My father had prepared me for marvels.” Pondering the timeline of my own children, I found it impossible to pinpoint the exact time their education began. Generations ago, parents ingrained principles into their children that have since found their way into me. Consequently, even before conception, my choices, formed by those endless principles, affected each of my children. Their formal education began the first time I smiled and said, “I love you,” to the warm bundle handed me. Children learn more from what we as parents are than from what we profess to teach them.
Johannes learned from his father’s words as well as his example. He shared, “My father always said that was the wonderful thing about learning, that there was no end to it.” Speaking of the desert, Johannes’s father, Zachary Verne, said, “[It] is a book of many pages, and just when you believe you know all there is to know it will surprise you with the unexpected.” Does this hold true for the desert only? No, but for marriage, parenting, industry, business, art, language, people. And of those things that seem concrete, tangible, or quantifiable, L’Amour teaches, “Nothing remains the same. Things are forever changing, and one must understand the changes and change with them, or be lost by the way.” This lesson, no doubt, was one learned by the author himself as he lived through the final stages of the change from the agricultural age to the industrial age, and then saw the birth of another change—one from the industrial age to the information age. We can learn the same lesson if we choose, as we are living to see that change come to full fruition.
Who can see to it that we keep up with the changes? L’Amour holds us accountable. He simply stated, “All education is self-education.” Once read, the words award ownership to the reader. Awareness and responsibility are instantaneous. He continues, “A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you an education.” The obvious point is that we are responsible to initiate the search for truth. The secondary point is that education comes in diverse forms. In addition to books, examples from mentors, living and long gone, are a precious resource for the hungry. L’Amour entreats us, “Do not be like the oyster who rests on the sea bottom waiting for the good things to come by. Search for them and find them.” We are our children’s first mentors, and our parents were ours. To find additional mentors who can stretch us and challenge us is a worthy goal.
Of his young son’s education, Zachary Verne confided, “Perhaps he will not understand, but there is a clash of shields and a call of trumpets in those lines. . .In some year yet unborn he may hear those words again, or read them, and find in them something hauntingly familiar, as of something long ago heard and only half-remembered.” In my personal search for wisdom, I find both comfort and determination in L’Amour’s The Lonesome Gods—comfort in knowing that all of humanity has been or will be where I am now—in search of truth, goodness, and mercy—and determination to push through the deserts, Fletchers and Isidro’s of my own. I do not think I can phrase my feelings any better than this very author who wrote, “What I am to be is something I must become. I must create myself from this that I have. We are nothing until we make ourselves something.” To own my future is my gift, my strand in the tapestry.