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<\/a>Just in case you haven\u2019t already seen this from President Dallin H. Oaks and his wife Kristen: \u00a0\u201cA Birthday Wish to My Wonderful Wife.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n From the Law School of the University of Chicago: \u00a0\u201cDallin H. Oaks, \u201957, Former UChicago Law Professor, Named President of the Mormon Church\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cIn first interview as prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ, President Oaks calls the faith \u2018a gospel of happiness and growth\u2019\u201d\u00a0President Oaks, President Eyring and President Christofferson sat down for an interview with award-winning journalist Jane Clayson Johnson\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Jenny Oaks Baker on her father, new President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n From a pair of non-Latter-day Saint writers: \u00a0\u201cA Bridge Builder\u2019s Legacy: What America Owes to President Russell M. Nelson\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Two more Latter-day Saint chapels burn: \u00a0\u201cFires damage Latter-day Saint meetinghouses in New Zealand and New Caledonia\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 They\u2019re so far distant geographically that it\u2019s difficult to imagine a conspiracy or a connection behind these fires. \u00a0But such incidents are becoming common enough that it\u2019s also difficult to avoid considering the possibility.<\/p>\n Yesterday, in a blog entry entitled \u201c\u2018All is Vanity,'\u201d<\/a> I jotted down a few thoughts on the seeming absurdity of a life that inevitably ends in non-existence, in a universe with neither God nor meaning. \u00a0Among other things, I compared our activities in such a life, such a world, to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic<\/em>.<\/p>\n I want to return to the topic a bit more. \u00a0It\u2019s still on my mind. \u00a0Let me start by first looking again at that image:<\/p>\n In the third part of T. S. Eliot\u2019s \u201cBurnt Norton,\u201d which, in its turn, is the first of his Four Quartets<\/em>, he writes of a state of being \u201cdistracted from distraction by distraction.\u201d \u00a0In that sense, I suppose, one might find comfort in rearranging those deck chairs and satisfaction in putting them into gratifyingly neat and straight rows, trying with great determination to ignore the fact that the ship upon which one is shuffling the chairs is rapidly sinking into the frigid North Atlantic. \u00a0Eventually, though, the slope of the deck will make their order unsustainable and one\u2019s effort to line them up impossible. \u00a0In the end, they will tumble into the waves and, with their would-be orderer, sink to the ocean floor some 12,500 feet below.<\/p>\n Returning to the fate of actual human persons, Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnet 60 is relevant:<\/p>\n Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, The sonnet\u2019s final two lines offer the confident hope that the poet\u2019s praise for the person addressed by the poem will survive, notwithstanding that person\u2019s aging and eventual death. \u00a0And, in fact, it has<\/em> survived. \u00a0Being praised by Shakespeare, perhaps the greatest writer in all of English literature or even in world literature altogether, does confer certain unusual advantages. \u00a0But it\u2019s a rather faint kind of immortality. \u00a0If there is no life after death, the person praised will be wholly unaware of such praise and will derive no benefit from it. \u00a0Moreover, we don\u2019t even know the identity of the person to whom Sonnet 60 is addressed. \u00a0He or she is forgotten. \u00a0And, if we want to be really cosmic about it, even the works of Shakespeare won\u2019t survive the future red-giant phase of our Sun, when it expands to incinerate the Earth and, perhaps, even to absorb it (along with the other inner planets, Mercury and Venus).<\/p>\n Another passage from Shakespeare is also apropos<\/em> here:<\/p>\n Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow The lines are spoken by the title character of the play, Macbeth. \u00a0Although he and Lady Macbeth had gained the throne of Scotland, she has just committed suicide and his words reflect his deep nihilism and despair. \u00a0Once a noble and heroic Scottish general, he has become a regicide, a usurper, a murderer, and a tyrant, and, perhaps as a consequence of his crimes (if not as a moral preparation for them), he has come to believe<\/span>\u00a0that life is ultimately meaningless, a series of futile events with no ultimate purpose or significance.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s certainly true that earthly glory confers no meaningful immortality, not even the wan metaphorical \u201cimmortality\u201d of \u201cliving on\u201d in the memories of others. \u00a0The monarchs of Assyria and Babylonia and Egypt were once the most powerful men on the planet. \u00a0Apart from specialist scholars, though, how many today can even name three or four of them?<\/p>\n When I lead tours to Egypt, we invariably pause to look at the so-called (and miscalled) Colossi of Memnon, which are actually massive statues of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV that stand before his largely vanished mortuary temple on the West Bank of the Nile River near Luxor. \u00a0While there, I read to them Percy Bysshe Shelley\u2019s 1819 sonnet \u201cOxymandias\u201d:<\/p>\n I met a traveller from an antique land Quick quiz: \u00a0Off the top of your head, how much do you know about the life, reign, and personality of Amenhotep IV? \u00a0And yet, once, he may have been the single most powerful, most important, and wealthiest person in the world.<\/p>\n To choose yet another example, closer in time and place: \u00a0Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) was elected twice as president of the United States. \u00a0Until recently, he was the only person who had served two non-consecutive terms in the White House, as the 22nd and 24th president, serving from 1885 to 1889 and again from 1893 to 1897.<\/p>\n Back in the nineties, I spent a summer at Princeton University in New Jersey. \u00a0One day, walking around the core of the town, I visited the Princeton Cemetery. \u00a0(I enjoy historic cemeteries; it\u2019s a strange quirk of mine.) \u00a0I had done no reading in preparation for my visit to the cemetery, so I was pleasantly surprised to come, by chance, upon the grave of President Grover Cleveland. \u00a0It was a beautiful sunny day, and I had the cemetery entirely to myself. \u00a0I was struck by the simplicity of the grave. \u00a0Grover Cleveland had once (twice!) been the most powerful man in the country, and here was his final earthly resting place, surrounded by the graves of hundreds of others who have been almost entirely forgotten, if not entirely so. \u00a0There was no great monument. \u00a0There were no visitors. \u00a0This is what he had come to after all the pomp and power of America\u2019s highest office.<\/p>\n Another quick quiz: \u00a0Off the top of your head, how much do you know about the life, the presidency, and the personality of Grover Cleveland?<\/p>\n Given his presuppositions, Bertrand Russell, whom I quoted in yesterday\u2019s blog entry, was surely right: Human achievements do not endure. \u00a0And, in the end, the universe is entirely indifferent to them all. \u00a0They will have made no difference whatever.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nSo do our minutes hasten to their end;
\nEach changing place with that which goes before,
\nIn sequent toil all forwards do contend.
\nNativity, once in the main of light,
\nCrawls to maturity, wherewith being crown\u2019d,
\nCrooked eclipses \u2019gainst his glory fight,
\nAnd Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
\nTime doth transfix the flourish set on youth
\nAnd delves the parallels in beauty\u2019s brow,
\nFeeds on the rarities of nature\u2019s truth,
\nAnd nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
\nAnd yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,<\/span>
\nPraising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nCreeps in this petty pace from day to day
\nTo the last syllable of recorded time;
\nAnd all our yesterdays have lighted fools
\nThe way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
\nLife\u2019s but a walking shadow, a poor player
\nThat struts and frets his hour upon the stage
\nAnd then is heard no more. It is a tale
\nTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury
\nSignifying nothing. \u00a0(Macbeth<\/i>, V.v. 19\u201328)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/a>
These two substantially ruined statues of Amenhotep IV (Eighteenth Dynasty; ca. 1350 BC), located on the western bank of the Nile across from Luxor, are all that remains of his massive memorial temple. \u00a0(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\nWho said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
\nStand in the desert.<\/sup> Near them, on the sand,
\nHalf sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
\nAnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
\nTell that its sculptor well those passions read
\nWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
\nThe hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
\nAnd on the pedestal these words appear:
\n\u201cMy name is Ozymandias<\/span>, King of Kings:
\nLook on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!\u201d
\nNo thing beside remains. Round the decay
\nOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
\nThe lone and level sands stretch far away.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/a><\/a>