Ah well, I should stop kvetching and follow Candide's fine advice: cultivate your garden, work your fields. That means do something, don't just sit there.
Candide and his companions have travelled the world and suffered immensely: they have known persecution, shipwrecks, rapes, earthquakes, smallpox, starvation and torture. But they have – more or less – survived and, in the final pages, find themselves in Turkey – a country Voltaire especially admired – living in a small farm in a suburb of Istanbul. One day they learn of trouble at the Ottoman court: two Viziers and the Mufti have been strangled and several of their associates impaled. The news causes upset and fear in many. But near their farm, Candide, together with his friends Martin and Pangloss, pass an old man who is peacefully and indifferently sitting under an orange bower next to his house... 'people who meddle with politics usually meet a miserable end, and indeed they deserve to. I never bother with what is going on in Constantinople; I only worry about sending the fruits of the garden which I cultivate off to be sold there.’ (BoL, continues)
Cultivating our garden, at this moment, does not afford us the luxury of ignoring the doings in our nation's capitol. We're going to have to mess with politics, that garden's been corrupted and only we can fix it. But the old man's got a point. Do what you can. Don't think all's for the best. If you spill the coffee, clean it up.
We have many other possible discussion topics today, as our reading ranges over Deism, ID (If the human eye was intelligently designed, why do so many of us need glasses?), Hume on miracles and the vanishing self, Rousseau's freedom and chains and "general will," Johnson's "refutation" of Berkeley's idealism, "The Birth of a Nation" screened in Wilson's (very) White House, the Scopes Trial, lots of name-drops we should all now recognize in How the World Thinks (including Socrates and Montaigne on learning to die, Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes on "soul," and these questions: Is it wrong to adopt the religion of your community without questioning it? 207 Can we really author our own lives? Do Americans underrate "contingency" and show too little humility? 208 Is there a breakdown of equilibrium between intimacy and integrity in the west? 214 But if we have time for just one, I like this: Do you "belong in your hometown"? 215
Thomas Wolfe said you can't go home again (Look Homeward, Angel), but of course you can. After you've got an education and seen Paris, though, do you want to? But isn't home another garden that needs tending? We all need to try and be safe at home.
Originally published 9.30.20
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