Candide by Voltaire

I wish I had gotten more out of this volume than I did. I picked it up thinking it was a philosophical novel, and was disappointed to find that it is little more than a philosophical fable. 

The philosophy is revealed by the title -- both of the book and of its central character -- Candide, meaning, if I understand it correctly, a kind of naïve optimism in Voltaire’s native French. And it is an attack on the philosophic fashion of its time, that one should approach all calamities in one’s life with an understanding that it could not have been any other way, that one is living in the best of all possible worlds.

From the book’s introduction:

The reasons for Candide’s immediate and enduring success with readers are many. It is a supremely wrought tragicomedy that slyly and irresistibly induces us to laugh at and simultaneously reflect upon the most dreadful events that befall humankind. It appeals to us today because, nearly 250 years after its publication, it has lost none of its relevance or satirical sting. It is particularly modern and pertinent because its dark comic vision is essentially in keeping with our own awareness of what separates our need for order, clarity, and rationality from the brutal reality of a chaotic world.

The fiercely relentless attack Candide unleashes against the evils of religious fanaticism, war, colonialism, slavery, and mass atrocities is more relevant that ever. The naive, young hero of the tale obstinately seeks personal happiness in a world beleaguered by all kinds of catastrophes wrought by the blind, unleashed forces of nature -- such as earthquakes and epidemic diseases -- as well as by violent, destructive human passions.

This is indeed the book I read, but it is, I think, the most optimistic of interpretations. Somewhere else in the introduction, it supposes that Voltaire himself would “probably have been both pleasantly surprised as well as bemused by the exceptional and enduring popularity of Candide, which he viewed as one of his minor works, unworthy to vie with his tragedies, historical essays, and epic and philosophical poems, on which he staked his posthumous reputation.”

Bemused is a good word for my reaction as well. I found this work to be little more than a sketch, a kind of rough first draft that should have been fleshed out into a full narrative if its author wanted it to have its full effect. Don’t get me wrong, stuff happens in this short novel, almost too much stuff, but who are these people that this stuff is happening to? I don’t really know, and characters come on and off the stage too rapidly for me to develop any kind of rooting interest in any of them.

But that’s okay, I guess, because it’s a fable, not a novel. The characters in it are not supposed to be people, they’re supposed to simply represent ideas or archetypes. The story isn’t the stuff that happens. The story is the clash of these archetypal ideas. In that regard it reminds me a little of Don Quixote, but Cervantes pulls off something transcendent that I’m not sure Voltaire had the time or interest to develop.

Here’s the closing paragraph, in which at least the moral of the tale is well represented. After years of wandering and trouble, Candide and his small band of companions have found a kind of peace on a tiny plot of land that they all share.

The little society, one and all, entered into this laudable scheme, and each began to exercise his talents. The little piece of ground yielded a plentiful crop. Cunegonde indeed was very ugly, but she became excellent at pastry-work. Pacquette embroidered, the old woman took care of the linen. Everyone, down to Brother Giroflee, did some service. He was a very good carpenter, and became an honest man. Pangloss sometimes would say to Candide: “All events are linked together in the best of all possible worlds; for, after all, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for your love of Miss Cunegonde, had you not been put into the Inquisition, had you not travelled across America on foot, had you not stabbed the Baron with your sword, and had you not lost all your sheep which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, then you wouldn’t be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.” “Excellently observed,” answered Candide; “but we must cultivate our garden.”

We must cultivate our garden. In other words, rather than blindly suffer the slings and arrows of our outrageous fortune, we must act and try to improve our situation. Yes, calamity will befall us all, but those who seek will always find more than those who cower in place.

That’s fine, but the deepest wisdom I found didn’t come from Candide but from the “old woman” he picks up along the way. She is one of the many beaten and tortured creatures that Candide meets in his beaten and tortured journeys. And after describing the specific toils and abuses that have comprised her life, she says this to Candide and his love Cunegonde on a sea voyage they take together:

In the different countries in which it has been my fate to wander, and the many inns where I have been a servant, I have observed a prodigious number of people who held their existence in abhorrence, and yet I never knew more than twelve who voluntarily put an end to the misery: namely, three negroes, four Englishmen, four Genoese, and a German professor named Robek. My last place was with the Jew, Don Issachar, who attached me to your service, my fair lady; to whose destinies I have attached myself, and have been more concerned with your misfortunes than with my own. I would never have even mentioned the matter to you, if you had not irked me a little bit; and it was not customary to tell stories on board a ship in order to pass away the time. In short, my dear miss, I have a great deal of knowledge and experience in the world; therefore, take my advice -- divert yourself, and ask each passenger to tell his story, and of these is one of them all who has not curses his existence many times, said to himself over and over again that he was the most miserable of men, I give you permission to throw me head-first into the sea.

“This ridiculous weakness,” the old woman reminds us, “is perhaps one of our worst instincts. What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us, and hug him close to our bosoms till he had gnawed into our hearts?”

Yes, cultivate your garden. But while you’re cultivating, remember that life is and always will be a serpent gnawing into your heart. There is no other remedy. Carry the burden, since the burden is your existence.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 71 (DRAFT)

In order to meet with Gerald, I had to cancel my lunch date with Bethany.

“Hey,” I said into the phone after calling her extension. “Can we take a raincheck on lunch today?”

“Sure, I guess,” she said. “Is something up?”

“Not sure, yet.”

Gerald and I didn’t go to the basement. There was a little bistro down the street that Gerald thought would be much more appropriate to our needs. It was part of a strange urban bed and breakfast and had only six or seven tables, none of them large enough for even the two people that were expected to sit at each. It had a French theme and was completely overgrown with houseplants, any one of which clearly received more water than any of the paying guests.

Getting settled, reviewing the menu, hearing the specials, placing our orders, waiting for the food to arrive -- through it all Gerald kept the conversation light and friendly. Had Jenny and I ever spent a night at this bed and breakfast? He had once, with his wife, before his divorce, and it was nice, a kind of get away. They felt like tourists in their home city, going to the art museum, having dinner at one of those ritzy places overlooking the lake, taking breakfast in bed the following morning. It was almost like a second honeymoon, but God knows it wasn’t enough to save the marriage. He and Kate probably shouldn’t have tied the knot in the first place, but at least there were no children to worry about. They still saw each other from time to time, that was the funny part, usually for a play or a concert or something they could both agree on. But never a movie. God no, he and Kate had completely opposite tastes when it came to movies.

It was more information than I wanted to know, but I smiled and nodded politely, wondering only when he was going to shift to what we had come here to discuss. Eventually, the waitress returned with two oversized plates, one in each hand, and placed them down in front of each of us -- mine a few pillowy ravioli looking abandoned in their cream sauce; Gerald’s a towering pile of salad with more Bibb lettuce than anything else. 

“Can I get you gentlemen anything else?” the waitress asked us. She was older than my mother, with her hair dyed blue and enormous discs in her earlobes.

“No, thank you,” Gerald said for both of us.

She disappeared and Gerald and I sat staring at each other.

“Dig in,” Gerald told me, picking up his fork and knife and beginning to shred his lettuce into a thousand smaller pieces.

I had the first ravioli in my mouth, cradling it on my tongue, while sucking in some air in an attempt to cool it down, when Gerald shifted gears.

“I have a message for you.”

I grabbed my water and poured some into my mouth. “You do?” I said, when enough had been cleared to allow me to speak.

“Yes. From Paul Webster. I called him this morning, and told him we were having lunch today.”

Having lunch today. Three innocent words. People had lunch all the time, didn’t they? Every day, as a matter of fact.

“And?” I said around an ice cube.

“He wants you to give him a call this afternoon.”

“He does?”

“He does. I’m going to give you all the particulars, and hopefully that'll be enough for you, but he wants to encourage you directly. Wants you to know that he is fully on board with this, and that he’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”

“Taken care of?” I asked, suspiciously. “What does that mean?”

So Gerald began to tell me. He told me we would each resign in the coming weeks, him first, and then me a few weeks later. Not so close together that it would raise any suspicion. He had already filed the incorporation papers and he already had his business ID, so for all legal intents and purposes, his new firm, Kreiger and Associates, was already alive and kicking, albeit it wouldn’t have any clients or cash flow until Paul severed Mary’s contract and pivoted to us. It might take a month or two before either one of us would start getting paid, but when it started, Gerald had already negotiated a package that represented a big bump for the both of us. Mine would be thirty percent more than I was currently making. What did I think of that?

What did I think of that? I wanted to know how he knew what I was currently making, that’s what I thought of that.

“Paul told me,” Gerald said simply, as if the subject of my salary was a common topic of discussion between the two of them.

That rubbed me the wrong way. Paul was a Board member, so he had access to the organization’s finances, but he wasn’t supposed to know what individual staff people were being paid. From the client’s point of view, they paid a flat fee to Mary’s company for all the services we provided, and how Mary decided to carve that up among the rest of us was her business. But Board members were notoriously nosy about those kinds of things, especially with what they often erroneously thought to be highly compensated staff, and it wasn’t unusual for such numbers to get passed around on the backs of envelopes.

“What’s your bump going to be?” I asked.

Gerald smiled. “Bigger than yours,” he said unapologetically. “But it’s my company. You’ll be working for me.”

He said those words like they were the most attractive part of the offer he was making, but that’s not how I heard them. In fact, the thought of reporting to Gerald Kreiger almost made me choke on my pasta. I tried to hide my reaction by coughing into my fist.

Gerald went on. He talked about how the company would be structured, and who we would lure out of Mary’s company in order to fill many of the positions. He talked about how he would be the lead on the client and how I would serve as his deputy, but how different that would be compared to the box Mary had painted me in. He would initially focus on the transition and the turnaround -- he was good at that kind of thing -- but once the client organization was up and running on all cylinders, he would turn its operation over to me so that he could focus on new client acquisition. That’s the only way to grow in this business, he assured me, gobbling up as many clients as you can and staffing them as thinly as possible. Once he pivoted in that direction, the day-to-day would be all mine, and I could start doing all the things Mary would never let me do now.

I’ll be honest. The more he talked the less appealing the offer became to me. I’ve told you about Gerald. He was a pompous ass, and that side of him was on full display as he laid out all of his half-baked plans. There were a thousand holes in what he was planning, some of them big enough to drive a monster truck through, and every time I pointed one of them out to him he dismissed it with a wave of class-ringed hand. 

“Oh, we’ll figure that out,” he would say, his confidence in his use of the word “we” indicative of his delusion that he was effectively selling me. “We can’t write everything in advance. But we’ll tackle that, better than Mary would ever dream of.”

His animosity against Mary was also on full display. He hated her -- even more than I did, it seemed. She was small-minded and in-over-her-head and an idiot. Sure, I could go along with those ideas, but with Gerald the anger seemed to go deeper than that. It wasn’t just that she was a clown, somehow she was a clown that was making her audience laugh at Gerald’s expense. As if her incompetence was somehow a direct threat to Gerald’s competence, that by working under her he was admitting that he was as much of a fraud as she was.

“She won’t know what hit her,” he said more than once during that lunch conversation, a devilish twinkle always coming into his eye. “When I take her client away from her, she just won’t know what hit her.”

And that seemed to be the only thing Gerald was really clear about. Everything else was fuzzy, something to be worked out later, after we had both quit our jobs and sat waiting for Paul Webster to make his move. By the time we were done with our meals I had more or less decided that I wasn’t going to follow Gerald on his mad quest, even regardless of what Paul Webster had to say, should I ever even call him. Calling him, I knew, would make me complicit in this conspiracy, and that wasn’t something I was willing to do. If I was going to turn State’s witness on Gerald, I would need to keep my nose clean.

“So, what do you think?” Gerald asked me near the end, most of the tiny bits of lettuce cleaned off his plate and only one stuck in his teeth. 

“I’ll need to think about it,” I said casually. “Talk to my wife.”

“Of course,” Gerald said easily. “Take a day. Or even two. And give Paul Webster a call. If you’ve got any doubts, he’ll remove them. The future is going to be so much brighter. For both of us.”

“You gentleman need anything else?” It was our blue-haired waitress.

“We’re good,” Gerald said confidently. “Just the check, please.”

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Beloved by Toni Morrison

This is a novel with a lot of layers to it. And I’m not sure I can really do justice to it. Frankly, there were times when I had some difficulty understanding who was who and what was going on. All I think I can do now is share my reactions to the words that are there, and try to pull them together into something universal, something we can all understand.

And, that, I think I can do.

Sethe had given little thought to the white dress until Paul D came, and then she remembered Denver’s interpretation: plans. The morning after the first night with Paul D, Sethe smiled just thinking about what the word could mean. It was a luxury she had not had in eighteen years and only that once. Before and since, all her effort was directed not on avoiding pain but on getting through it as quickly as possible. The one set of plans she had made -- getting away from Sweet Home -- went awry so completely she never dared life by making more.

Yet the morning she woke up next to Paul D, the word her daughter had used a few years ago did cross her mind and she thought about what Denver had seen kneeling next to her, and thought also of the temptation to trust and remember that gripped her as she stood before the cooking stove in her arms. Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?

Beloved, it turns out, is a novelized version of real events, and it centers on a slave woman, called Sethe in the novel, living in northern Kentucky in the 1850s. Sethe wants to flee to the freedom of the Ohio River and the Underground Railroad, but is held in place by her relationships with her children and the men who have and have not fathered them.

In this early passage we get a glimpse of what her life -- and the lives of the sixty million and more to whom Morrison dedicated her novel -- was really like. It was an aborted life, absent the luxury of planning, the ability to hope for the future, to even count on the permanence of the present.

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.

But despite this oppressive reality, Sethe does love, does love her children more than she probably should, knowing that they, like everything around her and everything given to her, were owned not by her nor by her heart, but by someone and something else; her master, yes, but also the whole of the society in which she helplessly swam.

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.

In this world, white and black are inexorably linked, linked not just by ownership, but by blood as well, because, of course there is miscegenation, and some of Sethe’s children are the products of these recognized and unrecognized acts.

And when the truth is against the wall, when Sethe has fled to Ohio with her children, and when she has been cornered in a dark place waiting for those with kind hearts to save her while those with dark hearts closed in, she does what might seem unthinkable, but was in fact the only thing she could do, the only path that existed in the dark, tangled jungle of the white people’s creation. She begins to murder her children, taking from them a lifetime of pain and taking from her owner the value that they represent, openly in the market, and, guardedly, within his heart.

These are the facts of the case on which the novel is based, but the novel uses them primarily as its launching pad -- in fact, obscuring this truth until deep within the narrative. The bulk of the novel focuses not as much on these facts, but on Beloved, the ghost of Sethe’s murdered child that reappears and competes for Sethe’s love and attention with Denver, Sethe’s living child. 

Denver thought she understood the connection between her mother and Beloved: Sethe was trying to make up for the handsaw; Beloved was making her pay for it. But there would never be an end to that, and seeing her mother diminished shamed and infuriated her. Yet she knew Sethe’s greatest fear was the same one Denver had in the beginning -- that Beloved might leave. That before Sethe could make her understand what it meant -- what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin; to feel the baby blood pump like oil in her hands; to hold her face so her head would stay on; to squeeze her so she could absorb, still, the death spasms that shot through that adored body, plump and sweet with life -- Beloved might leave. Leave before Sethe could make her realize that worse than that -- far worse -- was what Baby Suggs died of, what Ella knew, what Stamp saw and what made Paul D tremble. That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful magical best thing -- the part of her that was clean. No undreamable dreams about whether the headless, feetless torso hanging in the tree with a sign on it was her husband or Paul A; whether the bubbling-hot girls in the colored-school fire set by patriots included her daughter; whether a gang of whites invaded her daughter’s private parts, soiled her daughter’s thighs and threw her daughter out of the wagon. She might have to work the slaughterhouse yard, but not her daughter.

And in this respect, Morrison, I think, is helping us understand that this pain and this love is eternal -- this pain of not having what one loves, and this love that surpasses even that limitation -- that not even the passage of time can erase it from Sethe’s being, just as not even the eventual passage of emancipation and reform can erase it from our consciousness and our understanding of who and what we are.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 70 (DRAFT)

Gerald left my office door standing open. He hadn’t been gone more than ten seconds before I went over and closed it. First I looked out into the larger office. It was still early, but more than half of the pods were already occupied, people blowing on their coffee cups as they waited for their computers to boot up.

I looked right, down where Don’s Enormous Pod was situated. Given the angles and the heights of the intervening pod walls I couldn’t tell if Don was there or not. I looked left and saw Ruthie’s empty desk guarding Mary’s open door. It looked very much like the lights in her office were still off.

I shut my door and sat down again at my desk. I looked at my computer screen for a few moments, the characters of the email message I had been working on as meaningless to me as Sanskrit.

I picked up my phone and dialed my home number.

“Hello?” Jenny said guardedly.

“Hi,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat. “What are you doing?”

“I’m feeding Jacob his breakfast, what do you think I’m doing?”

Ouch. “I thought you might be sticking pins in that voodoo doll of me you keep under our bed.”

“I’ll do that later,” she said.

“Look, I know you’re still mad at me, but I need that incredible brain of yours right now. Can we call a truce for the next 10 minutes or so?”

“Hold on,” she said. “Let me get this plate of fruit out to Jacob, first.”

I waited patiently, hearing the knife hit the cutting board a few times and then her footsteps moving away. Here you go, honey, I heard faintly, and then footsteps coming back.

“What’s up?”

Her tone had shifted, and I was glad to hear it. Prior to her pregnancies, Jenny had been a public relations professional, and had been in and out of more companies that I had. In times like this I looked to her as a kind of business coach, and she knew it.

I told her everything that had happened so far that morning, skipping over my encounter with Bethany and going right to the discussion with Gerald. I told her that he was planning to quit, planning to take the client and start his own business, that he wanted me to go with him, and that Paul Webster had said there would be no deal without me.

“Whoa,” she said.

“I know, right? What do you think?”

There was a pause on the line. I imagined Jenny standing in our kitchen in her bathrobe and disheveled hair, one hand on her pregnant belly and the other holding the phone against her ear. In the background I heard Jacob call out for more blueberries.

“Just a minute, honey,” Jenny said to him, and then aimed her voice back into the phone. “I think you should call Paul Webster.”

That came out of left field. “What? Why would I do that?”

“Mommy! I want more blueberries!”

“How do you know Gerald is telling you the truth?”

“Why would he lie about that?”

“Because he’s a shifty asshole. You know that.”

“MOMMY!”

“Oh, Jesus. Wait a minute, Alan.”

While she was gone I turned things over in my mind. Jenny, of course, was right. Gerald was a shifty asshole, but even so, I didn’t see how a lie about Paul Webster wanting me to be part of the deal made any sense. If that wasn’t true, why would Gerald even bring me into the loop? Despite his protestations, he didn’t think highly of me. If Paul wasn’t compelling my inclusion, what other reason would Gerald have for approaching me? I mean, with this kind of information, I had him over a barrel. One word to Mary and Gerald and his secret deal would both be dead. 

I told Jenny as much when she returned to the phone.

“Yes, I guess that might be true,” she admitted. “But I don’t trust Gerald and you probably shouldn’t either. He’s asking you to quit your job, isn’t he?”

“Yes. He says we have to both be clear of the company before Paul orchestrates the vote to cancel Mary’s contract at the Board meeting.”

“That’s a pretty big risk, ain’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

“You guess? Quit your job and our only source of income on nothing more than the word of Gerald Kreiger?”

Okay, I acknowledged, it was a pretty big risk. No guessing about it. I told Jenny about the lunch appointment Gerald had made with me, about how he promised to fill me in on more of the details and make the formal offer of employment that I deserved.

“Uh huh,” Jenny said, less than impressed. “I would still call Paul Webster. If not before lunch then definitely after. You absolutely shouldn’t make any commitment to Gerald without talking to Paul and verifying the story.”

I told her not to worry, that under no circumstances was I accepting or quitting any jobs today. I would gather what information I could and then we could talk about it over dinner tonight.

“Okay, Alan. Sounds good.”

“Thanks, Jenny. I love you.”

“I love you, too. Bye.”

And then she was gone, back to whatever obstacles Jacob planned to put in her path today. Our parting words of affection had felt perfunctory but genuine, and I took that to be a good sign.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/