Robert E. Morrell

"Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument

About it and about: but evermore

Came out by the same Door as in I went."

Like Omar the Tentmaker, I began early on to look for the whys and wherefores of things -- but evermore found that little could be proven, and that what I and others believed was what we chose to believe.

And it's all for the better. We may lose some sense of security with the old dogmatic certainties gone, but we are now permitted to appreciate the beliefs and rituals of others, which are no less valid that our own. More importantly -- we no longer have reason to quarrel with the "infidel," since we are all believers in something.

Hence my interest in the various ways in we humans find meaning in life by suspending disbelief in the mythologies of the myriad religious traditions, great and small. The God vs. Science issue vanishes, as does the assumed superiority of Science over the Humanities (whose conclusions cannot be experimentally verified).

In my own case, I believe, but can never "prove," the greatness of the Western classical TONAL musical tradition. To me, atonal "music" is simply noise configured to conform to some preconceived ideas about "progress." I can never "prove" that I am right -- and it doesn't matter.

My academic home is Washington University in St. Louis (1965-1999), via Chicago and Stanford Universities (and the U.S. Navy). Now retired, I mostly taught courses in pre-modern Japanese language and literature, with particular emphasis on religious influences (Mahayana Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism) on popular literature (setsuwa) during the Kamakura period (1192-1333), and poetry. My wife, Sachiko, was Librarian of the East Asian Collection at the university for several decades, and together we worked to balance each other's strengths and weaknesses, resulting in a number of publications. For details, see http://robertmo@artsci.wustl.edu/~robertmo.