I am terrible—truly terrible—at caring for the herbs and vegetables in my balcony garden. It’s a simple enough task, I know: there’s no nuclear winter right now, and it’s summer here around -35.2,149.1 ; really, all I have to do is add a little water daily to a dozen pots and beds. And yet, somehow, I always seem to forget. Even as I write this, a part of me is thinking “Oh, it’s fine this time, I’ll do it in a moment! Look, I’m even writing about it!” But no. Don’t be fooled. Smart money—60/40—says I won’t. Instead, I’ll fall into some other, more absorbing task. A day will pass. Another. And so my lettuce wilts.
Last week, I started on a tattoo project, covering my arms (and chest, and upper back) with blackwork flowers. A ballet shrug of ink. While I’ve known of the artist for a while—an Adelaide expat, via Amsterdam and Stuttgart—six hours of clustered needle and capillary action on a Tuesday afternoon was the first time we’d really spent together. As it turns out, we’re both somewhat quiet, and they’re somewhat intense. It wasn’t until the second half of the session (my inner right bicep, a famously ‘spicy’ spot) that we really started talking. One thing that we turned out to share was this: we were both willing to admit, about ourselves, that we go a little mad without A Project. My mind may be a Parliament, but if you force me to take a six day holiday of ‘resting’, I can promise you: by day four, at the very latest, every chair in my Westminster will be ripped apart by one sad kelpie in need of a run. I am endlessly confused by people who can lie down, in the sun, on a beach, without a project or a growing sense of misery. My tattoo artist, as it turns out, feels the same.
The garden. The tattoo. The kelpie in my skull. The prospect of being—perhaps, in a certain sense—a “naïve animal”. All these are connected, in my mind, to that oft-misunderstood and oft-misquoted final passage of Candide:
“You must have a vast and magnificent estate,” said Candide to the Turk.
“I have only twenty acres,” replied the old man; “I and my children cultivate them; our labour preserves us from three great evils—weariness, vice, and want.”
Candide, on his way home, made profound reflections on the old man’s conversation.
“This honest Turk,” said he to Pangloss and Martin, “seems to be in a situation far preferable to that of the six kings with whom we had the honour of supping.”
“Grandeur,” said Pangloss, “is extremely dangerous according to the testimony of philosophers. For, in short, Eglon, King of Moab, was assassinated by Ehud; Absalom was hung by his hair, and pierced with three darts; King Nadab, the son of Jeroboam, was killed by Baasa; King Ela by Zimri; Ahaziah by Jehu; Athaliah by Jehoiada; the Kings Jehoiakim, Jeconiah, and Zedekiah, were led into captivity. You know how perished Crœsus, Astyages, Darius, Dionysius of Syracuse, Pyrrhus, Perseus, Hannibal, Jugurtha, Ariovistus, Cæsar, Pompey, Nero, Otho, Vitellius, Domitian, Richard II. of England, Edward II., Henry VI., Richard III., Mary Stuart, Charles I., the three Henrys of France, the Emperor Henry IV.! You know——”
“I know also,” said Candide, “that we must cultivate our garden.”
“You are right,” said Pangloss, “for when man was first placed in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, that he might cultivate it; which shows that man was not born to be idle.”
“Let us work,” said Martin, “without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable.”
The whole little society entered into this laudable design, according to their different abilities. Their little plot of land produced plentiful crops. Cunegonde was, indeed, very ugly, but she became an excellent pastry cook; Paquette worked at embroidery; the old woman looked after the linen. They were all, not excepting Friar Giroflée, of some service or other; for he made a good joiner, and became a very honest man.
Pangloss sometimes said to Candide:
“There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.”
“All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.”
This is not, I think, arbeit macht frei, nor is it a passive retreat from The World At Large into a state of Epicurian ataraxia + aponia, nor is it the imagined seclusion-to-write of Voltaire’s mates. Nor is it pessimism. Instead, I think it’s something more akin to a kind of pragmatic refusal to engage with both
- any of the widespread propaganda of a conflict theory, and 2. any ‘resignation’ from an (imagined-to-be preëxisting/primordial) state of conflict.
A pragmatic refusal which extends, I think, in the case of Candide’s garden-cultivation, even to the level of metaphysics. It is an unwillingness to entertain, not just stubborn Panglossian theodicy, but theodicy itself.
And it’s a compromise made by one’s Parliament. It’s something like:
Shit, well, we’ve got this kelpie. He’s not going anywhere. We may as well put him to work on something that’s positive-sum. He seems to want the work.
It’s silly, perhaps, but every time I read The Martian I end up crying. I’ve always struggled to explain the tears. It’s not because ‘Earth’ ‘comes together’ to waste resources and ‘bring our boy home safe’. That shit does basically nothing for me. The bits that make me cry are the countless scenes in which an earnest nerd works hard to solve a difficult problem for which they know the sole reward will be yet another problem of a different sort. That’s the ‘shared humanity’ that makes sense to me: a lack of habituation.