Finished Candide on Saturday

Candide is a wonderful little book. What it lacks in pages, it more than makes up for in scope. Voltaire skewers seemingly every sacred cow of the 18th Century. Whether it’s theater critics, the Jesuits, aristocracy, or other philosophers, none is spared the acid pen. The main point of the book is to thrash Spinoza’s optimistic philosophy. These tenets are explained to our eponymous hero by his tutor, Professor Pangloss. Pangloss tells us how all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The rest of the book is spent showing episode after episode of horrible events (all told in a quite humorous way) and how Candide tries to reconcile these events to Pangloss’s philosophy. Candide’s adventures take him on many stops along the route from Germany to the New World and all the way back to Constantinople. After following Candide around half the globe, one cannot accept that this is the best of all possible worlds, as nature and our fellow humans seemingly conspire to make mankind’s lot miserable. Voltaire doesn’t leave us without hope though. He leaves us with the thought that to live the good life, we need to “cultivate our own garden.” To me, he’s saying that you have to behave as best you can morally in the circumstances that you’re given. There are only so many things we can control, and the best we can do is to “cultivate” those that we are able to in order to work for the greater good of everyone.

As much as I like Candide, I can’t say that it should have made the list. It doesn’t seem “great” in the way the other three books did. Of course, being translated into many languages and still being read over 250 years later should confer some essence of greatness upon a piece of literature. I guess it just doesn’t seem “heavy” enough. It’s hard to say that when you’re talking about a book that catalogs a whole world’s worth of evil, from earthquakes, to war, murder, rape, and burning at the stake. But I guess I say this because the book is so damn funny. I imagine it’s even funnier in the original French. But of course, humor is the center point of satire, and the book is immensely successful there. Whether or not, it’s a “great” book, I’m glad to know that I still enjoyed the book as much, if not more, than I did as a teenager.

Next up is Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.