The Feast
You can only ever know so little
I’m traveling to Egypt in a week. Whenever I travel, I try to spend at least a few weeks before the trip reading up on the history, politics, and culture of the place I’m going.
This exercise always leaves me exhausted, and all too aware that I will ever know a fraction of what I wish to.
For example, here is a short sampling of questions I have about Egypt:
How did hieroglyphics develop?
What was the impact of Egyptian technology on ancient Greece?
To what extent did Egypt maintain its identity during rule by successive empires?
How did “Egyptian” become synonymous with “high-quality” in cotton?
Also, I’ve heard Egypt has pyramids. What’s up with those?
One can spend a lifetime studying any one of these questions and still have more to learn. And this is a tiny subset of the questions that I have about one civilization along one river in one corner of one continent.
Multiply this by every country, every era, every field of knowledge, and I’m confronted with an insurmountable vastness. My need to know will never be satisfied.
But lately, rather than seeing this vastness as overload, I’ve started to view it as a bounty.
The world’s unfathomable richness is laid out before us like a banquet table ten miles long. There are heaping platters of history and politics from every culture that ever lived. There are fresh crisp piles of science and mathematics. There are sharp, hot dishes—religion, philosophy, and centuries of courtly intrigue. And there are bright desserts: candied shards of literature, music, theater, and film from all places and times.
Each of our lives is a single meal from this banquet. We will be full to bursting before we have sampled even one percent of one percent of what’s in front of us.
Some of us select one dish we really like and eat until we’re full. There’s nothing wrong with a single-course meal!
Others of us are more methodical, trying to sample as many dishes as possible, perhaps specializing by cuisine (“I’ll try all the Lebanese options!”) or dish type (“I want to compare all the soups.”)
You only get one seat at the feast. You’ll never see, much less taste, all of the options spread before you, but it’s pretty amazing to be invited at all.
Dig in!