Candide

And how is that? Well, Voltaire, like most critics, like most satirists, doesn't necessarily give us something to aspire to.

I mean, what would that be other than a fantasy, like, you know, the perfect society that Candide encounters in El Dorado? Instead, Voltaire offers us a way out of the fantasies woven by the cult of sensibility, insofar as he cynically unmasks it all.

He pours cold water on it, pours cold water on us and our tendency to wax poetic about the beauties of faith and feeling.

Something else happened, by the way, apparently on the day of Human All Too Human's publication.

In Voltaire's famous novel Candide, a young man with an open mind and a pure spirit is tutored by a professor of philosophy called Pangloss.

Pangloss believes that the world we live in is perfect, and that everything that happens in it happens for the best.

But this philosophy is tested to the limit, as Candide and his companions are tossed about by the vicissitudes of fortune and catapulted all over the world in a seemingly endless string of meaningless and random misfortunes.

They suffer lashings, maimings, a war, sexual exploitation and even an earthquake.

In the face of all this mayhem, Candide, quite understandably, begins to doubt Pangloss and his blind optimism, and instead he hires the pessimistic scholar Martin, who believes that human nature is inherently cruel and that the world is nothing more than chaos and suffering.

But this theory too is challenged when Candide discovers El Dorado, a paradise with no persecution and no poverty, where the people are gentle and humble.

El Dorado shows Candide that, despite his bad luck, despite the problems the world faces, a more peaceful, more beautiful, more harmonious civilisation is possible.

At the end of the novel, all the characters come together and settle on a small farm to lead a simple life of subsistence.

But there are some steps we can take to limit its bad effects.

Cultivate your garden This is the famous advice given by Voltaire in his Candide.

We must cultivate our garden.

The message is about minding your own business, metaphorically growing your own vegetables.

So a few of the books that I'm covering here for October that I read in October were for that.

The book that we read for October was Candide by Voltaire.

And so I read this at the beginning of the month.

I really liked this book and it was such a fun discussion with my reading group.

wrote in

Candide one of the great, great attacks on slavery.

But Voltaire says in his own day, he says, well, the only thing worse than what the Europeans have done to the Africans is what Africans have done to their fellow Africans, is what Africans have done to their brothers and sisters.

We know from the few memoirs we have of people who were slaves in this period, people like Equiano, Olaudah Equiano, the most amazing man who ended up British and was baptized in Westminster, became a free man, had a most extraordinary life.

I'm following my rule in that at least one of my suggestions, one of my options has to be a book that is recommended by the staff of our local bookstore, LIC Book Culture.

The other book is Candide by Voltaire because it's come up in like five unrelated conversations over the past few months of my life to the point that I feel like I want to engage with Candide.

So Voltaire's Candide is... is a reaction to the supposition that we humans live in the best of all possible worlds.

And Voltaire, his hypothesis was that perhaps we do not in fact live in all possible worlds in the best of them.

Don't say.

on skimming the back of the book, It is similar in theme to what Hyperion was about.

How do you infiltrate colonial structures to then fucking burn them down?

Anyway, now the thing is, I've already read Candide because it was so freaking short.

So that wouldn't work.

But I'm going back to one of my favorite philosophers, Voltaire, who wrote Candide, of course.

That's his most famous book.

And Candide and Pangloss... unhappy with what's going on around them.

And so they take off to travel around the world to find the best of all possible worlds.

And instead, they find hate, they find war, they find jealousy, they find all these horrible things.

And they come back exhausted.

And Candide concludes that we must cultivate our own garden.