Archive for November, 2016

 

Cultivate Your Garden

candide-cultivatingLinda Burton posting from Arkadelphia, Arkansas – Remember high school literature and the French author Voltaire (1694-1778)? He wrote Candide (published 1759), a satire about optimism, his characters adventuring against a worldwide backdrop of horrible disasters and bad fortune. The conclusion measures the “plundering of kings” against the peaceful life of those who simply stay at home and “cultivate their garden.” Here’s a paragraph or two: …news was spread abroad that two viziers of the bench and the mufti had just been strangled at Constantinople, and several of their friends impaled. This catastrophe made a great noise for some hours. Pangloss, Candide, and Martin, as they were returning… met with a good-looking old man, who was taking the air at his door, under an alcove formed of the boughs of orange-trees. Pangloss…asked him orangeswhat was the name of the mufti who was lately strangled. “I cannot tell,” answered the good old man… “I am entirely ignorant of the event you speak of; I presume that in general such as are concerned in public affairs sometimes come to a miserable end…but…I am contented with sending thither the produce of my garden, which I cultivate with my own hands.”

The old man invites them into his house, where his four children proceed to serve them sherbet, candied citrons, pineapples, pistachio nuts, and Mocha coffee, unadulterated, the story goes, “with the bad coffee of …the American islands.” “You must certainly have a vast estate,” said Candide to the Turk; who replied, “I have no more than twenty acres of ground, the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labor keeps off from us three great evils—idleness, vice, and want.”
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