The Dog Days have hit my brain, apparently. Reading and writing are both a struggle, bad news when we are hitting some of the deeper texts soon! I read these texts TWO weeks ago now, while we were sailing in Maine with friends. I discovered a couple of new things about myself: I don't do a good job of taking notes on a book if I’m trying to “be casual” about it and read around my friends; I absolutely cannot write if I’m out of town with friends. I can do that when Bill and I travel, but creating the headspace to write feels very rude or selfish when I’m with friends!
I also have realized with this project that I absolutely must put one week to bed, so to speak, by writing my thoughts down before moving on to the next week’s reading. I know that at some point they will start blending together in my brain, but I want to address each text as independently as possible before I let that happen. Plus there is the distinct possibility that I will forget aspects of a text that I want to hold on to. All of these are happening to me right now! I can’t “just” read ahead, and get to the writing later. I’m worried that the podcast will suffer as a result, too.
It’s time to move on to the actual texts for this week, though. Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities List brings us to another text from Jean-Jacques Rousseau this week Confessions (Book One only) as well as the complete text of Voltaire’s Candide. As my boss in France used to say, “Ni chaud, ni froid.”
Last week I had to contend with Rousseau and his Social Contract. He came across as not my kind of guy. This week’s Confessions merely solidified it. Rousseau begins:
I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself.
Simply myself…. But I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world.
With a beginning like that, you are either in for a terrific adventure or a stultifying slog. I have my opinion.
Ted only has us read Book One, which takes us from Rousseau’s birth to age 21. He recounts his childhood, which starts off with an unspeakable tragedy: his mother died in childbirth. Rousseau's father threw himself into raising the little boy; he was doted on and taught from all the books in his father’s, mother’s and grandfather’s libraries. Rousseau’s childhood seems to barely intersect with his older brother’s, and the older boy is barely mentioned.
Rousseau goes on to tell how he was sent to study with his cousin at a tutor’s home. He and Bernard were not the same, but they were physically and mentally complementary, and were each other’s closest companions. That part of his childhood sounded magical, but of course it drew to an end. Since Rousseau wasn’t wealthy, he needed to be apprenticed. The job of law clerk didn’t work out for him (Rousseau was “too dull” according to his boss), so he was sent to an engraver’s as apprentice. It seemed he loved that work, but not his brutish master, whom he blamed for developing in him a taste for theft and general bad behavior.
There are also the youthful crushes that he describes, first with the daughter of his tutor, Mlle. Lambercier, and later with two young women who both use him to cover their more adult relationships. In particular he details how a paddling from Mlle. Lambercier gave him a taste for being spanked in later life (I can’t believe I’m typing this) and how it rendered him perpetually frustrated in his later relationships. After all, how could he possibly convince another partner to satisfy him in that way? I don’t know, but I also frankly didn’t need to know that!
The engraver’s apprenticeship lasted until Rousseau got locked out of the city gates a third time. Not wanting a third beating from his boss, he walked away from his position, his trade, and life as he knew it. With the gift of a sword from his friend Bernard, Rousseau left town for adventures. And that’s where our section of the book ended.
My dislike of Rousseau, which started last week, stems from the assurance that he seems to have that most everyone in the world is wrong and that he, despite all evidence to the contrary, is correct. He doesn’t accept responsibility for anything that he did as a child, laugh wryly, chalk it up to youthful misadventures. He blames his bad behavior on brutish masters—he doesn’t blame them in the moment, and then say that he recognizes that he had a part. No, it’s entirely their fault.
He says at one point:
My passions are extremely strong, and while I am under their sway nothing can equal their impetuosity. I am amenable to no restraint, respect, fear, or decorum. I am cynical…
Note the verb tense. That is entirely present tense, meaning he is currently all of these things. There’s no growth, no reflection. No gentle humor at regarding his youthful excesses. There’s just one Rousseau who exists as he is, one state, throughout his life. And that actually seems like a good place to turn to Candide.
Voltaire’s Candide proves, once again, that it’s better to show than to tell. This picaresque little novel was published in 1759, so it’s contemporary with Rousseau’s work. Candide, the protagonist, is the possibly-bastard son of a nobleman. He flees his home in Germany when the Turks invade, and he proceeds to have adventures all around the world as he seeks to be reunited with his true love, Cunegonde. He meets up with, loses, and then meets up again with his tutor Pangloss, travels to the New World, sees El Dorado, returns to Europe, meets kings and gets taken prisoner, and finally ends up with his beloved and an entire coterie of friends. To me, this was Forrest Gump before Forrest, and I loved it.
There is so much going on in this novel. It’s the first one in the reading list to take place in the New World. We track the syphilis epidemic and the auto-da-fés (basically sacrificing someone) in Portugal, not to mention the earthquake of 1755. There are battles and shipwrecks and semi-cannabalism. Through it all, Pangloss the tutor maintains his philosophy: “It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for all being created for an end, all is necessarily for the best end,” and “they who assert that all is well have said a foolish thing, they should have said that all is for the best.”
While all the characters in the book go through insane amounts of tragedy and pain, the only truly unhappy person is an Italian duke who has everything, including a life of ease. He looks on beautiful paintings and is dissatisfied, eats the best food and tastes nothing, listens to beautiful music but is bored. Candide doesn’t really reflect on this conundrum; instead he finds the man unpleasant and moves on.
Towards the end, though, he meets a very content Dervish who explains that he and his children have all they need as they take care of their own estate. He tells Candide about his own family, “our labour preserves us from three great evils—weariness, vice and want.” Candide reflects on the wisdom he didn’t get in any kingdom or from any duke, but from a seemingly modest man in Turkey. He realizes the the answer he is looking for, in how to live a good life, is to “cultivate our own garden.” And so that’s what they do, and they live fairly happily in spite of Cunegonde having lost her looks. Candide marries her anyway.
“Cultivating your own garden” might sound trite now, but in the spirit of the novel it is anything but. I think in the spirit of its time it’s also quite groundbreaking. Remember that this was the height of European colonization and the back-and-forth wars that seemed unceasing on the continent. To stop, to be content with taking care of the thing in front of you, that was a radical departure from the world around them. I loved it.
It happens that Italo Calvino wrote an essay about Candide in his collection Why Read the Classics? (Highly recommended, at least what I’ve read so far.) He also makes the point that narrative rapidity is hugely important in Candide. Cunegonde summarizes her years-long capture, daily rape, near-disembowellment, sale into slavery, and New World voyage into about a half a page, almost waving her hand at it. Pangloss is lost in battle, shows up with half his face missing from syphilis, gets cured, is executed in the auto-da-fé, and then turns up a few pages later—what?! That constant “and then this happened” is quite unlike anything we’ve read so far, and I think if you were to be a screenwriter this would be an ideal book to read. In fact, I am pretty sure the writers of Forrest Gump were at least inspired by Candide’s adventures.
So, one winner and one loser this week. I’ll take it!
As for the music, both Debussy and Ravel were on the list. I only listened to a little bit of Debussy. I think I’m getting frustrated with myself on this front. I completely skipped looking at French Impressionist painters.
But that does bring me to the end of this week’s assignment, and so it’s time for me to turn to the philosophy of next week’s texts. It’s a tougher one, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant, so hopefully I’ll be done with it before too long. I can’t shake the longing I have for the older books, but I’m curious to see if I’ll capture the spirit of Dante or Homer as I move through the list towards the 20th century.