The Taste of the Other

There is a film by Agnès Jaoui that I saw long ago and that has stayed with me. *The Taste of Others*. The story of a rough, uncultured man who belatedly discovers that he hungers for worlds he thought he despised, and that this hunger transforms him. I kept the title in memory, but I shifted it slightly. I am not speaking of the taste of others, as a social or cultural category, I am speaking of the taste of the other, in the singular. Of that interior tension that drives one to seek what is not oneself, and of the nervousness it produces when one understands that one will never entirely succeed.

There is within me a nervousness that I have carried for a long time and that I am learning, slowly, to tame. It is the nervousness of missing out. Missing an exhibition I will not have seen, an artist I will not have discovered, a culture I will not have understood, a book, a film, a conversation, a journey. The list of what one can learn is infinite. A person's life is not. This disproportion produces in me, and I believe in many others, a muted anxiety that goes unnamed but weighs heavy.

I call this the taste of the other. Not altruism, not tolerance, not even curiosity in the conventional sense. Something more acute: an appetite for what is not me, for languages I do not speak, practices I have not mastered, ways of seeing I have not learned to adopt. The taste of the other is the conviction that there exist, elsewhere, ways of living, seeing, building, creating, that are foreign to me and yet concern me. I must go seek them out. I will never be able to seek them all.

There lies the impossible quest. No one can see everything, read everything, understand everything. And yet, in a profession like mine, refusing this quest would mean refusing the profession itself. An architect who is interested only in his own culture builds buildings for himself, not for the world. Yet it is not my tastes that will inhabit the apartments I design. They are the tastes of strangers, of families I will never meet, of generations not yet born. The taste of the other, for an architect, is not a library refinement. It is a working tool. It is even the condition of possibility for the work.

This nervousness I spoke of, I long endured as a flaw. I would pass by a museum's program that I did not have time to visit and I would feel at fault. A friend would tell me about an emerging Japanese architect I had not followed and I would feel something like shame. A biennale would open somewhere in the world and I would calculate how many of them I would miss that year. Culture became an inventory, and each unchecked box weighed on the next inventory. I lived with the permanent sensation of being behind on what I should have seen, read, understood. The knowledge of not knowing, more than the not-knowing itself, was suffocating.

Action saves me, partially. When I draw, I do not know better but I know differently. The project demands a decision, and the decision suspends the anxiety. One cannot draw a balcony while simultaneously doubting all the ways one might have drawn it. To build is to decide, and to decide is to rest for a moment from the infinite quest. I believe many architects of my generation entered the profession for this reason without knowing it: not because they loved to build, but because building allowed them to stop searching for a few hours. Action is a rest for the mind that fears being behind itself.

Knowledge never rests. It expands, it branches out, it contradicts itself. The more I learn, the more I measure the extent of what I will not learn. The more I travel, the larger the world seems to me. The more admirable architects I meet, the more I sense how many others exist, whose names I do not even know. This is the paradoxical inflation of culture: it does not reduce ignorance, it reveals its amplitude. Each book read brings to light ten books one should read. Each exhibition seen reveals a hundred exhibitions one should have seen. At this game, one never wins. One can only choose how to lose with dignity.

I am learning, with age, to lose better. Not to abandon the quest, but to accept that it is infinite and to stop making it an accusation against myself. I will not see everything. I will not know everything. And this is probably just as well, because an architect who had seen everything and understood everything would no longer draw anything: he would be paralyzed by the totality of references. Partial ignorance is a condition of creation. It is in lack that one invents, it is in the gap between what one knows and what one senses that one finds one's own voice. Total culture would be a prison. Chosen culture is a freedom.

But the taste of the other does not diminish. It is refined. With time, I believe I am interested in fewer things, but more deeply. Rather than chasing after all exhibitions, I choose a few and I inhabit them. Rather than following all emerging architects, I select a few and I truly read them. Rather than visiting fifteen countries a year in overview, I prefer to return to the same place several times, until I understand it a little. Quantity has given way to quality of attention. And this is perhaps, in the end, the true taste of the other: not wanting to embrace everything, but accepting that each encounter demands time, silence, patience.

I am not cured of it, I never will be. It still happens, before the poster of an exhibition I will miss, before the cover of a book I will not read, that I feel that old nervousness return. But I now know what it is. A form of anxious greediness, the reverse side of a true passion. The taste of the other, when it is sincere, always hurts a little. It is by this pain, I believe, that one recognizes one is still alive, still curious, still ready to be surprised.

The other is not a program to complete. It is a horizon toward which one walks knowing one will not reach it. To walk, to move forward, to hope. That is what keeps me going.

— Manal Rachdi