I trailed Obama as he wandered through the collection of ancient pillars and scaffolding and tributes to the gods, a monument to the origins of democracy and the ruins left behind by lost empires and expired beliefs. When I saw him afterward, he repeated a maxim that he’d shared with me in the early morning hours after the election of Trump, a refrain that sought out perspective: “There are more stars in the sky,” he said, “than grains of sand on the earth.”
