Many are called, to ever more splendid surroundings, and at ever younger ages.
Cities still tend to have bigger and more splendid churches, mosques and temples than do mere towns and villages.
Then, armed with the knowledge that Mardi Gras had not taken over the entire world, we ventured back into Binche for the final dance and the fireworks, more splendid than the night before and also, given a crowd of at least 10,000, more alarming.
Today, my family of four lives in a five-bedroom Queen Anne house with three bathrooms, and we sometimes feel deprived my neighbors' new homes are larger and more splendid.
I am here to report that Dante's 'fro looked even bigger and more splendid than ever.
Beyond here, the buildings become ever more splendid, with Italianate balconies and glazed tiles lining their façades, until you reach Vasaplatsen, a road that slopes gently past a jumble of cafés and design emporiums.
This week, at the opening of a much larger and more splendid exhibition at the Barbican in London, I looked at many pictures that might easily have included me in their monochrome scenes: as a baby in a pram, a boy in a school cap on a smoky station platform, a young reporter in a crowd at a royal wedding.
Or, even worse, perhaps I am the one seeing a pale imitation blue, while you see a blue that is infinitely richer and more splendid than mine.
"In 1939 the American comic book, like the beavers and cockroaches of prehistory, was larger and, in its cumbersome way, more splendid than its modern descendant," he explains, and proceeds to show us why.
