Ponds, Pyramids & Pizza Hut

A few hundred feet away from the Great Pyramids at Giza, there is a Pizza Hut. One of the seven wonders of the ancient world, these 4,500-year-old structures dominate the surrounding desert, deeply impacting the millions who travel to behold their size and precision. Centuries of work with hand tools and raw manpower, forged out of the earth by brute force of will, meant to honor past kings and forever-reigning gods – and they’re just a short walk away from a damn Pizza Hut. While you eat a cardboard imitation of Italian cuisine, you can glance out a logo-emblazoned window and see them, indescribably cheapened by your vantage point. This Pizza Hut – a blemish of modernity, an icon of soulless corporate capitalism – has the right to exist mere yards away from the pyramids. It’s a uniquely modern travesty.

Branded chairs, plastic cups, and mediocre pizza isn’t what you expect when going to Giza. You expect to eat at a hole-in-the-wall shop, run by a kindly man named Mohammed. He twists a ring on his calloused index finger, given to him by his father, who received it from his father before him. He explains that this little hole-in-the-wall was built by his great-great grandfather and will never be allowed to leave the family. He explains that he wakes up every morning at five to make the dough for his flatbreads, and pulls the finished product out of a wood-fired oven by hand. Hence the callouses.

That’s the kind of human experience and connection you expect at the pyramids. Not pizza made according to instructions printed in comic sans on laminated pieces of printer paper, served in a box with a tacky logo and the details of a worldwide sweepstakes contest printed on the side. The pizza is satisfying enough to keep you coming back, but not satisfying enough to make you stop eating it when you’re full. The box’s colors and fonts are picked meticulously by market researchers to maximize your consumption of their product. The product itself is completely unremarkable as not to alienate any customers. But for some reason you’ll eat it until you want to puke, and that is by design. The employees who serve it are paid just enough to keep them going, but not enough for them to afford anything better than that same Pizza Hut, with a 15% discount.

That’s not humanity.

Humanity doesn’t act in accordance to numbers and trends, reacting only in the proper way to maximize profits. That’s a program, soulless and quantitative. That’s Pizza Hut. Humans work and tinker and feel. They have values, and preferences, and ideas. And they enact those ideas on the world. Sometimes this happens in ways that are fleeting – origami cranes, doodles in margins, etc. Sometimes they’re admired 5,000 years later from the window of a Pizza Hut.

Think about this, but not for too long, because it's depressing. We haven’t enacted our will in a positive way for centuries. No beautiful megaliths, no emblems for posterity. We have the capability, but the will has been lost.

The pyramids were built by hand, you know. It’s popular to say that we don’t know how the ancient Egyptians managed to do it, but that’s outdated. Archeologists played with different ideas for decades, theorizing about how the stones could have been cut so precisely, and how they could have been moved across such massive distances with complex tools and machines. A bunch of effete Egyptologists spent decades deliberating over what mechanisms could have been used to power the construction. The code wasn’t cracked until those archeologists got out and tried their ideas… along with some stone masons and laborers.

(What, did you expect them to do the work themselves?)

What they found was shocking – none of the complicated systems worked, but simple elbow grease did: carving by hand, with skill developed over generations, and dragging the stones by manpower alone. So, it’s not accurate to say we don’t know how the pyramids were built – rather, we can’t comprehend how it was done. Modern academics can’t comprehend how people could get up at the crack of dawn and exert themselves to their absolute limit for twelve or more hours, only to go to sleep and do it again the next day. And the next, and the next, for a dozen generations or so. All to build a monument which ultimately serves no functional purpose except aesthetics. Really, they couldn’t understand why someone, much less a whole civilization, would do such a thing. The appreciation for beauty that inspired the pyramids has been lost along with the drive to create it. People serve a much higher purpose now, the far nobler god of profit, and get tired from sitting at a desk and scrolling through Facebook for a few hours. They lament their lower-back pain and pop a Prozac so they don’t think too hard about the futility of it all as they lay sleepless later that night.

Consider our past instead. Building pyramids without lumbar support or antidepressants. Copying thousand-page manuscripts by hand; painting chapel ceilings. Mastering nature through sheer force of will. Now consider our present. Bit of a disconnect.

So why not build your own pyramids? Metaphorically speaking, that is. The actual pyramids took generations of labor and knowledge to create; that cohesion and will is gone, so you must start simpler than that. Start with something like digging a hole. Ditch-digging, despite its status as a lowly profession, is incredibly difficult, but in a deeply human way. Go outside and take a shovel to a patch of dirt, and don’t stop. As you reach ankle depth, then knee depth, you’ll be Wilfred Owen, digging trenches in the French countryside. You’ll be Ernst Jünger, digging the same trenches just across No Man’s Land. You’ll be a pilgrim, a frontiersman… a pyramid builder. Most importantly, you’ll be human. Not numbers on a screen, not a combination of credentials and achievements – merely a human, doing what humans do. Building for the sake of it.

Once the hole feels a little too deep for comfort, start expanding the edges. Make it look nice, and at least six feet wide by ten feet long. This will take multiple days, assuming you’re going at it alone with a shovel. That’s good. Digging holes is character development far more than taking ENGL 206 or going to a wine tasting in the Napa Valley. Those are recent inventions, separated from the core nature of humanity. They are divorced from our very DNA, and they dehumanize you by your participation. You’ll learn more about yourself and the world by digging a hole then you ever will on Twitter. Or at Harvard, for that matter.

Once the hole is sufficiently large, and your neighbors are sufficiently confused, go to the library and get a book on pond construction. Yes, go to the library. Sure, the information is available at your fingertips, but why not make a trip of it? A pilgrimage, even. A Crusade, if you will. Walk there if possible; enjoy the ambience and fresh air. Unless you live in a city. In that case, probably drive. At least keep the windows down, though – the air tastes a lot less stale at thirty miles per hour.

“Why a pond?” you might ask, and understandably so. You could get in touch with the same parts of your own humanity by building a shelf or going on a hike. But not everybody has the knowledge to build a shelf from scratch, and you might be inclined to go to IKEA and purchase a pre-cut abomination that somehow takes four days to assemble. The base materials for a pond have remained unchanged throughout the generations. All you need is the earth below your feet and a shovel. Technically, you don’t even need a shovel; it just makes things easier. But I digress. Follow the instructions in the book, and make the whole thing look nice. You certainly uncovered some rocks while digging – use them for décor, and use the extra dirt to form planting beds around the banks of your pond.

The pond should have koi in it. Koi are a uniquely human invention. They are a feat of pyramid-level ambition applied to biology. They serve no ecological function, and aren’t eaten as food; koi exist solely for the sake of beauty. And that’s what you’re doing, with this personal pyramid – striving, through sheer force of will, to create beauty in an ugly world. Hence, koi.

An old legend goes that koi, swimming upstream to spawn, encountered a waterfall with a horde of jeering demons at the top. The koi swam up the mighty torrent, but the demons kept raising it, just out of reach. Despite their robust fins and broad bodies, the strongest koi gave up after a few attempts. Eventually, the hardiest koi – the ones that refused to capitulate, that just kept struggling no matter how high the waterfall rose – crested the top. As a reward for their perseverance, the gods turned those koi into dragons, unstoppable beasts of fire and fury. But really, they were already unstoppable as lowly fish; unstoppable by even the highest waterfall. Unstoppable by the very embodiments of evil who kept raising the bar for survival.

Much can be learned from this fable. Contemplate it while you sit beside your pond.