On the ground in New South Wales

Last updated on: November 18, 2018 at 9:56 pm by Dan Peterson

On the ground in New South Wales 2018-11-18T21:56:56-07:00 Dan Peterson

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Not far from our hotel: The Sydney Harbour Bridge (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

It’s often said that, as we age, the time seems to go by faster and faster.

I can testify from personal experience, having long since entered extreme geezerhood, that this is true. Not infrequently, I’ll be thinking about a film from five or ten years back only to look it up and find that it actually appeared twenty-five or thirty years ago. And many of the allusions that I make in my classrooms now sail right over the heads of my students; they’ve never so much as heard of them. (Of course, to be fair, that’s also the case when — as I often do — I make a comparison in my class discussion of the Arabic fable Kalila and Dimna between one of the leading characters in it and the character of Iago in Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello. Typically, in a class of fifty or sixty students, three or maybe four will have read the play and been familiar with Iago.)

Anyway, this flight from Los Angeles to Sydney also seemed to pass more rapidly than I recall from previous occasions. Of course, I did watch four fairly shallow and fast-paced movies in order to pass the time — Skyscraper, with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson; Ant Man and the Wasp; The Meg; and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom — and we did have an empty seat between us (the only one, so far as I noticed, on the entire plane). I even napped, fairly poorly, for several hours. And I read a bit, including half a dozen chapters in the first volume of Heilige: Die Geschichte der Kirche Jesu Christi in den Letzten Tagen, which is the German version of the still relatively new official history Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days: The Standard of Truth: 1815–1846. I’ve read it in English, of course, but I thought that it would be fun to read it in German, too. I hope that Latter-day Saints generally have read it or are currently reading it.

We took a shuttle from the airport to our hotel, which was probably a mistake. By the time we actually got on our way, amidst terrible stop-and-go traffic, we had circled the airport for at least an hour, picking various people up. After a very long flight, we just wanted to get to our room and stretch out.

Oh well. We’re here now. Somehow, the Australia Border Forces failed to keep us out.

My lecture here in Sydney isn’t until 27 November, but we were able to come early without missing any additional classes because of the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday and because, on this coming Tuesday, owing to BYU’s peculiar academic calendar, regularly-scheduled Tuesday/Thursday classes have been replaced by Monday/Wednesday/Friday classes. My goal is to be done with jet-lag by the time I deliver the lecture; at least one person should stay awake for the whole thing.

Posted from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

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