The foreign man
A foreign man loves the culture of a nation other than his own. He cherishes it and cultivates it, every waking moment laden with the symbols and rituals of a culture that is not his. With the peculiar characteristics of his birthplace - a kind of narrow sense of order that doesn’t fit the openness and disorder of the new one - he abides by it and propagates it, with even more respect and effectiveness than its original bearers.
Is this man not of this culture? If you were to ask him why he loves it so, even more than his own, he might say something like, “When I was thirteen, a friend invited me to one of your gatherings. There, I was forced to dance with a girl. I didn’t know how to dance your dances, as I was not brought up as one of you. But she was patient with me and taught me. We spent the day dancing, talking, and laughing. I went to more of your gatherings and met her many more times. I made other friends there too, and soon, most people I spent time with, I had met at one of your gatherings. Years later I married the girl at one of your temples, our children blessed by your priests, our children’s children too. You ask me why I cherish it so…”, he pondered for a few seconds, “I’d say it’s because the best memories of my life are tied to it.”
The foreign man is not unreasonable to love this culture more than his own. A culture has a shape, and like all living beings, it wants to maintain this shape across time. Its symbols and rituals, its sounds and songs, its sayings and stories, they must be interwoven with its subject’s lives. A culture produces memories, and those memories propagate it into the future.
Look over there. You look at where the old man is pointing and see a group of fifty or so paired young boys and girls, dressed in strange clothes, dancing a strange dance to increasingly strange sounds. A young girl, the only one left unpaired, approaches you. You look at the old man and he looks at you and nods. You get up and dance.