Standing at Abu Simbel

You can look at photographs of Abu Simbel your whole life and not understand it. I know, because I did.

Then you stand in front of it, and the first thing that happens is that your sense of scale breaks. The figures cut into that rock face do not read as art when you are underneath them. They read as a statement of capability. Somebody planned this, organized the labor, solved the engineering and finished it, and it is still here.

The second thing that happens is quieter and it stays with you longer. You start doing math about the people who built it. Not rulers. Workers. Somebody carried water that day. Somebody's hands were tired. Ordinary people, with families and worries, executing something so precise that thousands of years later a person from another continent walks up and cannot fully take it in.

That is what I want people to feel, and it is exactly what does not transfer through a screen. A photograph flattens it. A caption explains it. Neither one puts you at the base of it with your neck craned back.

There is a lesson in that for how we teach anything. We hand children the summary and then wonder why the summary does not move them. It was never going to move them. Summaries are for remembering things you already care about.

You cannot fly everyone to Egypt. But you can stop treating the summary as the lesson. Show the scale. Show how long it took. Show who did the work. Ask what it would take to build the same thing today, with our equipment, and let the number sit there.

And if you ever do get the chance to stand there, go. Some things only give you what they have when you are standing in front of them.