Friday, 4/18/25: Dear Readers, my wife and I are in Las Vegas after a four hour drive through the Mojave desert. I'm on my laptop on the 9th floor of the Luxor Hotel. My wife is conducting an online class across the room. I just got back from a long walk through the Luxor casino into the Mandalay Bay casino and retail area. I also wanted to walk outside for the cool desert evening, but this place is not designed for walking outside, which is a wasteland of construction and busy streets without sidewalks. I must say, though, that I adore the large copies of ancient Egyptian sculptures in the Luxor lobby. I find them captivating, though they lack the power to make me gamble. They did make me want to stay here, so that I could drive once around the entryway, flanked by imposing columns, the Sphinx, and a pyramidal hotel, before seeking the massive airport sized parking lot. What a sucker I am for falling for those faux antiquities. On the other hand, they offer good focal points, especially this Passover week, for meditation on God's immediate purpose in launching the 10 plagues. Each of the plagues was designed to destroy a specific Egyptian god, from Horus to Ra. The best known plague, the killing of the firstborn, was intended ultimately to kill the pharaoh, considered a god. And yet here they are, the Egyptian gods (minus a pharaoh), back again in Las Vegas!
Update, Saturday, 4/19/25, 8:00 AM: The casino/resorts of Las Vegas are hermetically sealed from the surrounding desert, to maximize gambling revenue, and I long to escape to Red Rock Canyon, 15 miles west, where the Southern Paiute and many earlier native American tribes hunted and sat around fires over the last 10,000 years. What would be their reaction if they suddenly had a vision of modern Las Vegas? Certainly shock and incomprehension, the same reaction we would have if we viewed our culture a hundred years from now. The desert was not planned into our current trip, though. This is an exploration of the city. Today we see a show at the new Sphere. It is advertised as "immersive," as Red Rock would have been. I expect to enjoy the show, in spite of my whining about the desert.
No comments:
Post a Comment