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jinyu
Age. 37
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Location Denver, CO
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Candide - a review
Sunday. 1.6.08 3:59 pm
I finished Candide today. Incidentally, my shift key is breaking, so I am trying to learn how to left shift. So if I miss some capitals, that is why. I am not sure if I liked Candide or not.

Pros: it was pretty funny (in a sort of ludicrous way)
the characters certainly had an adventure

Cons: it seemed to have a decidedly awful outlook on the world, seeking all the while to undermine the 'Best of possible worlds' philosophy.

Now, permitting that very few people's lives are so magnificently god-awful as they were depicted in the book,I find myself thinking: could these people's lives have been good if they put a different spin on them. Admittedly, the characters went through an awful lot of hardship: rape, the death of loved ones, torture, false accusation, manipulation, loss of funds, personal death and recovery from the condition, however, there are a lot of things that did go well for them. Particularily Candide. Candide, getting a rocky start, actually did not have much damage to his own person at the end of the novel. He got the woman of his dreams (albeit a little uglier than he remembered her), he saw the city of gold, brought out 100 sheep laden with more gold than he could ever use and after losing all the sheep and all their riches, still had an unimaginable amount of wealth which was squandered in the attempt to find his love. None of the people he loved stayed dead and he saved them from destruction numerous times. All in all, he really didn't do half bad. I think, that great difficulty can only come in light of great sucesses. Candide could not have lost such great wealth if he had never, at one time, possessed it. Candide could not have been fooled out of anything if he had not originally had something. His love could not have lost her beauty had she first not had it. So, while I would not argue that this is "the best of all possible worlds", I would argue that we wouldn't really recognize it if we had it and this is the best possible world that WE have to deal with. The fact that it is our only possible world doesn't make it any less so.

What do you think? What is your opinion on theory that this is the 'best of all possible worlds'? Disagree or agree? Why do you agree or disagree? If you feel like you need to write a blog on it, be sure to link it in your comment. I'd love to hear your opinions.
2 Comments.


There's no such thing as a "best of all possible worlds." It just depends on opinion.
» randomjunk on 2008-01-06 04:15:15

I kind of think that the book mocks Professor Pangloss for his ridiculous optimism, because clearly what happened to all of them was not the best of all possible IMAGINED worlds, but I think in the end they find perhaps find the best of all POSSIBLE worlds. That is, there are a lot of chance happenings in life, and if you imagined the best "possible" world you would imagine a world in which none of these chance happenings turned out badly for you, which is in fact hoping for the best of all "impossible" worlds. So I think where Candide comes to in the end is to say, "You can't seriously view what has happened to us as the best way it could have happened; the most you can do is echew grandiose philosophies that try to bend the happenings of life into some overarching philosophy, and instead view your world as the best world that you currently have, and go about tending your life and your relationships without trying to justify the past to yourself as either duly unfair or all for the best. i.e., just tend your own garden.
» Zanzibar on 2008-01-09 02:04:58

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