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“Signifying nothing”

“Signifying nothing”

Last updated on: October 17, 2025 at 8:40 am by Dan Peterson

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“Signifying nothing” 2025-10-17T08:40:23-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Rockefeller Chapel, at the University of Chicago (photo by Matthew Bisanz, Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph.)

Just in case you haven’t already seen this from President Dallin H. Oaks and his wife Kristen: “A Birthday Wish to My Wonderful Wife.”

From the Law School of the University of Chicago: “Dallin H. Oaks, ’57, Former UChicago Law Professor, Named President of the Mormon Church”

“In first interview as prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ, President Oaks calls the faith ‘a gospel of happiness and growth’” President Oaks, President Eyring and President Christofferson sat down for an interview with award-winning journalist Jane Clayson Johnson”

“President Dallin H. Oaks’ family photo gallery: President Oaks loves to spend time with his family — sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, camping and fishing, and laughing together”

Jenny Oaks Baker on her father, new President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”

From a pair of non-Latter-day Saint writers: “A Bridge Builder’s Legacy: What America Owes to President Russell M. Nelson”

Two more Latter-day Saint chapels burn: “Fires damage Latter-day Saint meetinghouses in New Zealand and New Caledonia” They’re so far distant geographically that it’s difficult to imagine a conspiracy or a connection behind these fires. But such incidents are becoming common enough that it’s also difficult to avoid considering the possibility.

Willy Stöwer, “Der Untergang der Titanic” (1912) (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Yesterday, in a blog entry entitled “‘All is Vanity,'” 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. Among other things, I compared our activities in such a life, such a world, to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

I want to return to the topic a bit more. It’s still on my mind. Let me start by first looking again at that image:

In the third part of T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” which, in its turn, is the first of his Four Quartets, he writes of a state of being “distracted from distraction by distraction.” In 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. Eventually, though, the slope of the deck will make their order unsustainable and one’s effort to line them up impossible. In the end, they will tumble into the waves and, with their would-be orderer, sink to the ocean floor some 12,500 feet below.

Returning to the fate of actual human persons, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 60 is relevant:

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d,
Crooked eclipses ’gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

The sonnet’s final two lines offer the confident hope that the poet’s praise for the person addressed by the poem will survive, notwithstanding that person’s aging and eventual death. And, in fact, it has survived. Being praised by Shakespeare, perhaps the greatest writer in all of English literature or even in world literature altogether, does confer certain unusual advantages. But it’s a rather faint kind of immortality. If there is no life after death, the person praised will be wholly unaware of such praise and will derive no benefit from it. Moreover, we don’t even know the identity of the person to whom Sonnet 60 is addressed. He or she is forgotten. And, if we want to be really cosmic about it, even the works of Shakespeare won’t 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).

Another passage from Shakespeare is also apropos here:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing. (Macbeth, V.v. 19–28)

The lines are spoken by the title character of the play, Macbeth. Although he and Lady Macbeth had gained the throne of Scotland, she has just committed suicide and his words reflect his deep nihilism and despair. Once 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 that life is ultimately meaningless, a series of futile events with no ultimate purpose or significance.

It’s certainly true that earthly glory confers no meaningful immortality, not even the wan metaphorical “immortality” of “living on” in the memories of others. The monarchs of Assyria and Babylonia and Egypt were once the most powerful men on the planet. Apart from specialist scholars, though, how many today can even name three or four of them?

The Colossi of Memnon (Wikimedia Commons public domain image))
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. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

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. While there, I read to them Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1819 sonnet “Oxymandias”:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Quick quiz: Off the top of your head, how much do you know about the life, reign, and personality of Amenhotep IV? And yet, once, he may have been the single most powerful, most important, and wealthiest person in the world.

“The Younger Memnon” (actually a bust of the New Kingdom pharaoh Ramses II), which is now located in the British Museum in London, may have been the inspiration for Shelley’s poem.

To choose yet another example, closer in time and place: Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) was elected twice as president of the United States. Until 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.

Back in the nineties, I spent a summer at Princeton University in New Jersey. One day, walking around the core of the town, I visited the Princeton Cemetery. (I enjoy historic cemeteries; it’s a strange quirk of mine.) I 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. It was a beautiful sunny day, and I had the cemetery entirely to myself. I was struck by the simplicity of the grave. Grover 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. There was no great monument. There were no visitors. This is what he had come to after all the pomp and power of America’s highest office.

Another quick quiz: Off the top of your head, how much do you know about the life, the presidency, and the personality of Grover Cleveland?

Given his presuppositions, Bertrand Russell, whom I quoted in yesterday’s blog entry, was surely right: Human achievements do not endure. And, in the end, the universe is entirely indifferent to them all. They will have made no difference whatever.

In this photograph, two American flags decorate the grave of President Grover Cleveland. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph). On the day that I visited the cemetery, there were no decorations at all.

In conclusion, I share something from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™: “From Competition to Collaboration: How BYU Athletics Shines Christ’s Light Through Service”

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October 15, 2025

"All is Vanity"