{"id":94235,"date":"2022-02-17T12:52:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-17T19:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=94235"},"modified":"2022-02-17T12:58:19","modified_gmt":"2022-02-17T19:58:19","slug":"an-endless-smorgasbord-or-a-hurried-sack-lunch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2022\/02\/an-endless-smorgasbord-or-a-hurried-sack-lunch.html","title":{"rendered":"An endless sm\u00f6rg\u00e5sbord, or a hurried sack lunch?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Dark<\/a>
The Berner Oberland in Switzerland, near Interlaken, is, I think, my favorite landscape on Planet Earth. Here is a view in the Oberland town of Lauterbrunnen, located in the valley that , as I had long suspected, inspired Tolkien\u2019s description of the home of Elrond and the Elves in Rivendell.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m continuing the theme of my blog entry from yesterday, \u201cOur only hope for full flowering\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

In my remarks at the 2017 FairMormon conference, one of my comments concerned\u00a0the fact that none of us achieve our full potential in this life. \u00a0In fact \u2014 and, for this point, I used the tragic story of Ludwig van Beethoven as an illustration \u2014 many of us die sadly young, undernourished, uneducated, impoverished, and\/or ill, coming nowhere near full realization of our talents and abilities, our potential for service and accomplishment.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

To me, this offers a powerful reason to hope that life will continue beyond the grave. \u00a0It certainly doesn\u2019t prove that we\u2019re immortal, but it strongly encourages me<\/em>, at least, to desire such continuation.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, I\u2019ve also often thought about the matter from a quite different angle:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

From where I\u2019m positioned, geographically and historically, I have enormous freedom of enjoyment. \u00a0I can eat Mexican or Thai or French or Indian or Chinese or American or Italian food. \u00a0If I choose, I can do so while watching a documentary about ancient Rome or the Beatles, or listening to an excellent recording of the Vienna Philharmonic performing a symphony by Bruckner. \u00a0Afterwards, I can read Homer or Dante or Yeats or Hemingway or Tom Clancy, or watch Blue Bloods<\/em>, or listen to the Beach Boys.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Others, in other locations, don\u2019t enjoy the variety that I do. \u00a0If you\u2019re a rural Mexican peon<\/em>, you eat Mexican food every day \u2014 and, very likely, a limited range of that<\/em>. \u00a0The same, mutatis mutandis<\/em>, is true for Chinese and Indian peasants, and so forth. \u00a0And they seldom if ever get to enjoy Mozart or John Coltrane or Kathy Mattea or Bob Dylan. \u00a0They never listen to recordings of the Berlin Philharmonic or the London Symphony Orchestra or the Incredible String Band. \u00a0Nor did any ancient Roman, no matter how aristocratic, enjoy the variety of diet that\u2019s available to average Americans today \u2014 fruits at all seasons, vegetables unknown to the Empire, milk shakes, Korean barbecue, hamburgers, Iskender kebap, turkey chili, and hundreds of other culinary wonders.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m privileged beyond any Roman emperor of the past in my range of actual and potential experiences. \u00a0I live in far greater comfort \u2014 e.g., air conditioning, central heating, indoor plumbing, electric lights, and so forth.\u00a0 Moreover, I\u2019ve been to Rome, but Augustus Caesar never came to Utah, never flew in a helicopter over the lava cauldrons on the Big Island of Hawaii, never rowed a canoe on Lake Louise, never even wandered about the alpine meadows of the Berner Oberland.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s where my thoughts began to go a few summers ago, while I was sitting at the Utah Shakespeare Festival:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I can (and do) enjoy reading Othello<\/em>\u00a0and King Lear<\/em>, or taking in\u00a0performances of\u00a0Two Gentlemen of Verona<\/em> and The Merchant of Venice<\/em>. \u00a0Chaucer and Dante could never do that. \u00a0Nor could Shakespeare\u2019s Elizabethan audiences listen to Verdi\u2019s Otello<\/em> or watch Franco Zeffirelli\u2019s film of Romeo and Juliet<\/em> or Kenneth Branagh\u2019s version of Henry V<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Moreover, neither Shakespeare nor his contemporaries ever had the opportunity to read Goethe, or Dickens, or Tolkien, or Kafka, or Keats, or Lorca, or Kazantzakis. \u00a0Just as Henry Purcell and John Dowland \u2014 two early English composers that I like very much \u2014 never got the chance to hear Bach, Strauss, Brahms, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Prokofieff, and Stravinsky.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here, though, is my issue:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Presumably, the development of civilization, of literature and music and art (and science and other fields), hasn\u2019t stopped. \u00a0We haven\u2019t achieved stasis or equilibrium.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And, just as I pity the generations before Shakespeare because they never saw As You Like It<\/em> and Richard III<\/em>, and the generations before Beethoven because they never heard his Ninth Symphony, and those who came before Newton because they never learned about modern physics, so am I, too, to be pitied.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Because there will be future Shakespeares, Beethovens, and Newtons (and Wagners and Tschaikovskys and Goethes and Einsteins) and I will never read, or hear, or read about their work. \u00a0Nor will anybody now living.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And that is merely another way in which our lifetimes are too short.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are beautiful sunsets and landscapes that I\u2019ll never see, wonderful foods that I\u2019ll never sample, brilliant songs and symphonies that I\u2019ll never hear. \u00a0We\u2019re permitted, in this mortal lifetime, to experience only the tiniest fraction of the infinite variety that the world has to offer and that it will, over future centuries, continue to bring forth.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

In certain moods, I find that unutterably sad.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here, though, is another item that I found some time back in the Christopher Hitchens \u201cHow Religion Poisons Everything\u201d File<\/em>\u00a9.\u00a0 It\u2019s from\u00a0Why Science Does Not Disprove God<\/em>, by the late Israeli-American mathematician, statistician, and science writer Amir Aczel<\/a>. \u00a0(He died of cancer toward the end of 2015, at the relatively young age of 65. \u00a0A sad loss.). Anyway, I was struck by this observation from Dr. Aczel, on page 205 of his book:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Daniel Dennett is a leader in the atheism movement in America. \u00a0He and his wife organize and participate in cruises for atheists, as well as other events aimed at cementing a world-wide community of atheists. \u00a0But these atheist groups do not get involved in charitable work, as many religious organizations do. \u00a0While staying at a hospital, you may be visited by a nun, a rabbi, or an imam, bringing you food or newspapers or comforts of many kinds, as many people know from personal experience. \u00a0And it is true that sometimes religious people do this in an effort to convert patients \u2014 but not always. \u00a0There are innumerable examples of religious persons who engage in charitable work in hospitals, poverty-stricken communities, halfway houses, and the like out of sheer charity and the urge to do kind things for complete strangers. \u00a0I have never heard of an atheist group volunteering to offer comfort to the ill or the distressed.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know whether his impression of atheist groups is true.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t yet confirmed it.\u00a0 But his impression is my impression, as well.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 *** \u00a0 I\u2019m continuing the theme of my blog entry from yesterday, \u201cOur only hope for full flowering\u201d: \u00a0 In my remarks at the 2017 FairMormon conference, one of my comments concerned\u00a0the fact that none of us achieve our full potential in this life. \u00a0In fact \u2014 and, for this point, I used 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