General Conference was last weekend. It was very inspiring. One item that caught my attention was that there was much emphasis placed on quorums: the importance of being active in one's quorum, and what quorums can do to help their members.
Last night we went to the Easter Pageant at the temple in Mesa. Once again we've had a cool spring, but we took blankets and jackets, and it was a very enjoyable evening. For years, we've kept saying that we'll go this year, but we always were busy. This year we were busy, but we went anyway. I am glad that we did so.
I read Candide by Voltaire. It challenges the philosophy that every bad thing that happens to us ultimately works for our good. Candide is a young man who is optimistic and somewhat naive about things who falls in love with Cunegonde. Then his mixed experience of bad luck and good luck starts. All kinds of natural disasters and bad experiences caused by evil, conspiring and greedy men happen to him, and initially Candide survives them to testify that that the proposed thesis is true. But as more and more bad things happen and as he speaks with more and more people about their lives, he starts to question the thesis.
At the end of the story he is finally reunited with Cunegonde, but she is now ugly and he doesn't want her anymore. He and the others with him discuss the thesis, and don't come to any satisfying conclusion. They spend their time discussing philosophy, but it just results in irritability and boredom. He then learns a lesson from an ignorant Turk who pays no attention to what is going on in the world, but cultivates his twenty acres, which delivers him from “boredom, vice, and want.” Candide accepts the lesson, and as Adam did in the beginning, he tends his garden.
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