What’s the ‘Pyramid project’ in your life?

More than five thousand years ago, an official in Egypt, with wonder and puzzlement, writes about the decades-long construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza when those working on the scheme are completely in the dark about why it’s being built

‘And so I conclude,’ says the Superintendent and Controller of Compounds, ‘that the Great Pyramid defies all purpose and meaning. Does this mean that it has no purpose or meaning? …

‘We are all enslaved to it, yet no one seems to know why, except for Khufu [the pharaoh], if he exists, and I doubt whether even he knows, now.’ However, the Superintendent asks the remote and shadowy Pyramid Committee for an answer. After ten years, he gets a reply: ‘Man needs the Great Pyramid.’

The Superintendent now feels he is ‘groping towards a certainty’ and, despite disillusion, he endures to see the Great Pyramid completed ‘in the hope that every side of its futile riddle will become clear’. Ultimately, at the age of 80, he comes to understand, and realises his own salvational ‘Pyramid project’.

In a truly fascinating new book, philosopher and cultural historian Nicholas Hagger offers a series of inventive ‘parables’ for today, drawing an ingenious parallel between the raising of the Great Pyramid and the personal projects that may dominate the working lives of…