This essay embarks along the ancient Nile River with a radical, but not entirely bizarre, claim. Through a puzzling together of a small piece of papyrus deriving from the place and time, we have gained a clearer picture of the city at the foot of Pharaoh Khufu's Pyramid. Those there to build it might have been content, happy even. My, perhaps escapistic, fantasy of being able to travel back to an early brewing of our high culture, a time before something was lost, leads the text on to reflections on work, craft, art, and architecture. The essay is an associative and personal study that flows through the works of artists and thinkers such as Ann Hamilton, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, Susan Sontag, Guy Debord, Milan Kundera, and others. And towards the end of it, through my own six paintings that became my master's degree work. I hope the nature of this essay offers an understanding of how and why those paintings are what they are and look the way they look, without me disclosing a vacant truth. Herein is a mournful yearning for the little that endures, as well as an insistent clinging and defense of that which is elusive, experimental, spontaneous, and disheveled.