Candide

I'm not sure what I was expecting from Candide, but something about the way Maggie Nelson dropped Voltaire's famous quote about killing an admiral to encourage the others into Bluets made me feel like I was missing out having not read something of his.

Candide comprises a series of unfortunate events constructed to test (or ridicule) the philosophical premise that we live in “the best of all possible worlds.” If Voltaire had called the novel Fuck You, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—Philosophical Optimism is Trash and So Are You I would have been better prepared.

It was at its best for me when contemplating happiness (and, briefly, suicide). I imagine the maxim ‘money can't buy happiness' may already have been tired in the 17th century, but either way it's well-expressed here.

I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley—in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered—or simply to sit here and do nothing?