The Prized Treasures

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  “Will the prized treasures of today always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house? . . . .   The “sampler” that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as “tapestry of the Victorian era,” and be almost priceless. The blue-and-white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up all the “Presents from Ramsgate,” and “Souvenirs of Margate,” that may have escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English curios.” Jerome K. Jerome, “T...

Music, Mushrooms and Truth

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John Cage (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992), a contemporary American composer, believed that the universe is impersonal by nature and that it originated only through pure chance. In an attempt to live consistently with this personal philosophy, Cage composed all of his music by various means of chance. He used, among other things, the tossing of coins and the rolling of dice to make sure that no personal element enters into the final product. The result was music that has no form, no structure, and for the most part, no appeal. This is a video of one of his most well-known piece, called "4'33"":



Though his professional life accurately reflected his belief in a universe that has no order, his personal life did not, for his favorite pastime was mycology, the collecting of mushrooms. Due to the potentially lethal results of picking the wrong mushroom, one cannot approach a mushroom on a purely by-chance basis. Concerning that, Cage stated, “I became aware that if I approached mushrooms in the spirit of my chance operations, I would die shortly.”
John Cage believed one thing, but practiced another. In doing so, he is an example of the man described in Romans 1:18 who “suppresses the truth of God,” for when faced with the certainty of order in the universe, he still clings to his own novel theory.

(Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There.)

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