Beyond this wasteland, I could see the dunes of Giza and the pyramids. The next day I went there. Everyone has seen them so often, in pictures in books, in fillms, in news broadcasts, in cigarette adsl the images and impressions colected on the surface of my eyes, ears, and skin while wandering among them had already all been projected there many times already. Beyond these images and impressions, I tried to sense what the pyramids are. In grade school and in the books I now read they were identified as tombs of kings who had divinized themselves – the colossal monuments of a monstrous excrescence of egoism. Which is to view them as did the barbarian grave robbers (not the last of these barbarian chieftans was Howard Carter, who sold half the plunder from Pharaod Tutankhamen to the New York Metropolitan Museum for fourteen thousand pounds sterling). One could just as well describe a medieval castle as a maesoleum for a lord bishop or king on the argument that their tombs are found in them.
-Alphonso Lingis, Trust, “Breakout” pp 189 – 190