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strip of paper about six inches long and give it a single twist before taping the ends together. Then start anywhere to draw a continuous line along the surface. The first return will be to the opposite side of the paper; only on the second full round will you meet the beginning of your line, “And know the place for the first time.” Mathematicians call this a one-sided surface since the entire surface can be covered without ever lifting the pencil.
    Barkev reminded me of the Möbius strip when I started talking about spirals, so I made one to put on the table with my other visual aids, a new-old desk friend constructed from paper. My desk was becoming crowded, not by these few objects but by the range of meanings they evoked. Much of my writing consists of taking ideas that are coiled within one another. Before spinning and weaving, wool must be carded, and in the same way thoughts must be opened into sequential prose. It would not do to lay them out too precisely, however, for I have wanted to convey something of the process of learning, and most learning is not linear. Planning for the classroom, we sometimes present learning in linear sequences, which may be part of what makes classroom learning onerous: this concept must precede that, must be fully grasped before the next is presented.
    Learning outside the classroom is not like that. Lessons too complex to grasp in a single occurrence spiral past again and again, small examples gradually revealing greater and greater implications. The little boy staring wide-eyed at the sacrifice of a sheep may one day be a hajji , one who has completed the Meccan pilgrimage and seen the sacrifices and the Holy Cities and returned home looking at ordinary life differently. The effect of such partial repetition is to heighten contrasts, sharpen the differences created by context. A son will experience the Feast of Sacrifice differently as his father ages, discovering new pleasure if the family becomes prosperous enough to buy its own sheep. Through the years family constellations will shift and the society regroup as his own body learns about strength and illness, sex and dying. Morals are rarely drawn, and the comparisons are not made explicit, but anyone who has wept at a wedding knows that the past and the future are present in each single ceremonial.
    In the same way, the stories told here all have more meaning than I know how to unpack in the context of a single chapter, and the objects on my desk will shift to represent different concepts. It may be a good idea to begin reading from the beginning, but the reader who returns from the end to the beginning will find “a ring when it’s rolling” that has no end. We will not finish with the Persian garden in one visit, or the Passover meal, or the Filipino rage at arrogant Spanish noses. In recent years, I have been learning not only about improvisation as a mode of participation and observation in the present but about the possibility of recycling the past, the flashes of insight that come from going over old memories, especially of events that were ambiguous, mysterious, incomplete. In the past, when memorization was a common form of learning, children committed long passages of poetry and scripture to memory without understanding them. Then, if the texts were well chosen, they had a lifetime in which to spiral back, exploring new layers of meaning. What was once barely intelligible may be deeply meaningful a second time. And a third.
    Spiral learning moves through complexity with partial understanding, allowing for later returns. For some people, what is ambiguous and not immediately applicable is discarded, while for others, much that is unclear is vaguely retained, taken in with peripheral vision for possible later clarification, hard to correct unless it is made explicit. Beyond the denotations lie unexplored connotations and analogies.
    What we call the familiar is built up in layers to a structure known so deeply that it