#49-Candide

It was worth the read.

Which made me really happy because I was concerned.  For the last year, I have run into Voltaire’s Candide at various libraries, bookstores, and once at a friend’s place during a birthday party.  There are occasions when a title is screaming at me to read it and it won’t shut up until I do.

Candide is a short, pessimistic tale about a good man named Candide and all the troubles he suffers for love of Cunégonde.  After her father catches the beginnings of their romance, Candide is exiled and somehow gets caught in the middle of wars and civil strife.  He and Cunégonde are constantly finding each other and being separated time and again, and all throughout, he continues to witness pain and suffering among all the children of the earth.

Voltaire wrote it because he rejected the philosophy that all the sufferings and pains were part of a divine plan, and he especially hated the teaching at the time which stated that this world was the best of all possible worlds because God had created it, therefore everything that happened worked out as it was supposed to.

And what was interesting to me was that even though the story followed Candide, the story was not really about him.  He was only one man out of the millions who suffered, and as the story progresses, his troubles are by far not the worst.  The old woman (that’s all she’s called) has the most tragic story, filled with kidnapping, rape, torture, and mutilation, and what’s the horrifying part about her story was that it didn’t feel as horrifying, not after all the other terrible stuff that had happened prior to that point.  It felt like another nail in the coffin.

The ironic thing about the book, though, is that no matter how many times a death is set up, nobody actually dies.  They just move from one horrible happenstance to another until the whole community has come together to succor each other and make do with what they have left.

It’s a bitter book that actually is funny right when you need to disconnect from how awful everything is.

That moment came for me with the Eldorado chapters.  Candide has been separated from Cunégonde again, and through complete accident and disaster, he finds himself in Eldorado, which is paradise on earth.  The city is so rich that gold’s value is the same as mud.  They’ve been given everything that they need, they live in peace with each other, and they are completely sealed away from the rest of the world.  This is Utopia.

And Candide leaves.  After all the sorrows and trials he’s had, now that he has found the better world, he decides to go back.  It seems noble and romantic at first: he is so in love with Cunégonde that he cannot imagine life without her, so he leaves to find her (while bringing plenty of Eldorado’s mud with him.)  And of course, life continues to be terrible for him and he meets plenty of old friends and new with their tales of sorrow and woe.

The part that gets me, once he finds Cunégonde, he finds that she’s suffered so much that she’s lost all her natural beauty and he discovers he didn’t actually love her at all, he was just horny and thought that she was hot.  He still marries her—mostly to annoy her brother—and lives out the rest of his life in an unfulfilling marriage.

He had it all in Eldorado and he lost it all for someone he didn’t really treasure at all.

Now, that does say some pretty awful things about him as a man, but it’s also a great commentary on how we never appreciate the great things that have been given to us until long after they’re gone and out of our hands.  Quite often, mankind chooses misery because that’s what we’re comfortable with.

And, of course, there’s the endless philosophizing about misery and the existence of evil in the world.  The philosophical discussions go from beginning to end, until Candide has had enough of it and he and the community go to work on their property.  My favorite line is actually the last line.  Candide’s friend, Pangloss, has a revelation that if Candide had not been through all that he had been through, he never would have been in the home that he was now in.  “‘Well said,’ replied Candide, ‘but we must cultivate our garden.’”

Or translated, you may speak the truth but I don't care.  The work is what makes me happy.