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A new year
I survived the first weekend of Cherry Blossom Festival. Aside from my allergies, it was no problem. And everyone on our crew had experience from last year, so things went smoother than normal. And we didn't get rained on this year -- like last year -- so that was a plus.The good thing about double dosing myself with antihistamines was that I felt less homicidal when it came to attendees and vendors not following the sorting rules. Perhaps I'm also growing as a person. Ha.
It was my intention starting out to be as mellow as possible, but at the end of the day when the "fuck you" bags start coming in from the vendor -- the ones where they don't even pretend to follow any of the rules, throw everything into one black bag and then bury it in a random bin -- the antihistamines might have helped. The vendors even wait until the last minute, right before their trucks pull away to play this, their final card of the day.
Next week I'm only working CBF Saturday and I picked up an event in Golden Gate Park for Sunday. That was a ploy to get my usual middle of the day shift for CBF, but it hasn't worked as yet. I don't have any objection to spending Sunday in lovely Hellman Hollow.
Your tax dollars at play
I believe I've mentioned the Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit scheme now under construction here. This was years in the planning (I stopped attending meetings years ago because I thought it was stupid) and now it seems that they failed to anticipate birds nesting in the spring. So now they are having to work around trees with nests.
This means that the same crews, that have now cleared most of the median, will have to return in the future to clear the little islands of green they had to leave behind.
Looking north from Sutter where the median has been excised.
Looking south from Sutter, island of green mid-block.
And while I'm showing the ever changing face of SF, here's Salesforce Tower, now topped out and just waiting to be fully enveloped in steel and glass.
Salesforce Tower topped out from the street above mine.
And, just because it was in my camera, here's a shot up the street showing that I have a thing for old lighting fixtures,
Powell @ Washington.
Candide
"The Quality of Candide" by J. G. Weightman...
p156 ...Voltaire was never at any time fair-minded, and there seems every reason to believe that he did not bother to reread, or even read, Leibniz's Theodice before writing his satire. As both [Andre] Morize and [W.H.] Barber point out, he mixes up the two main forms of the theory of optimism: the belief that evil is an effect of the human angle of vision, and the belief that evil is a necessary part of creation... Leibniz neither denied the existence of evil nor held the simple finalistic views which Voltaire attributes to Pangloss. Also, as Barber shows, Leibniz was an activist whose purpose was to encourage men to virtuous initiative withing the all-embracing framework of God's will, and as such he was, in a sense, on Voltaire's side...
...
The Angel Jesrad in Zadig, which comes before Candide, is on the whole Leibnizian in his statement that a world without evil would be another kind of world... In other works of his later years... Voltaire contradicts himself, saying in one place that God is obviously limited and repeating in another that evil exists only from the human point of view and must be unknown to God in His perfection.
...Here was a man who... gradually came to be obsessed with the scandal of the presence of evil in the universe. At the same time, with his clear and vigorous brain he could only suppose that God was an immeasurably greater Voltaire who had organized the universe on rational lines and was not, ultimately, responsible for evil. How could God have willed evil since Voltaire, like any decent person, found it intolerable? Yet evil existed, and God must be good. But how could a good God . . . etc... The lesson of Candide is the permanent one that there is no... intellectual solution to the problem of evil, but that we go on living even so, and even when we think we have no faith.
p157 ...He himself [Voltaire] is Pangloss, just as he is Candide, Martin, and Pococurante. The book is a transposition of his inner debate... To the question: 'Why, if God is good (and we must suppose that He is), does evil exist?' there is no articulate answer which is not a juggling with words. Book VII of St Augustine's Confessions is quite elaborate, but are its logical fallacies not obvious? Chapter VII of Book III of St Thomas's Summa Contra Gentiles seems no less purely verbal. And when we open Leibniz to see how Voltaire misunderstood him, we find this sort of argument:
For God sees from the beginning of time that there will be a certain Judas... in general one can say that since God found it proper that he should exist in spite of the sin He foresaw, it must be that this evil will be repaid with interest somewhere else in the universe, that God will derive a greater good from it, and in short it will be found that the sequence of events which includes the existence of this sinner is the most perfect of all those which is possible. But to explain... the admirable economy of a particular choice, that cannot be done while we inhabit this transitory sphere; it suffices to know it without understanding it.
Sounds like Pangloss to me.
...
p158 ...As Barber says:
Leibniz . . . never really abandons a priori argument. He bases his knowledge of God's nature on a priori rational considerations . . . and once God's infinite goodness and wisdom have thus been established, all else follows deductively... To all [Pierre] Bayle's paradoxes he [Leibniz] has... only one reply... the world as it is is God's creation, therefore no better would is possible.
Why am I going on and on about this? Mostly because it's fun to see other people supporting positions I've held since my undergraduate days. I always found this a priori reasoning about God infuriating.
On the other hand, reading about 18th century philosophy is similar to reading about 18th century chemistry, in that there are still other shoes left to drop. I have the feeling Voltaire, while rejecting so much, still clings to some remnant of a belief in moral phlogiston.
...Candide is not... a message of hope, or at least not exactly in the way suggested by some critics who take a favorable view of it. Morize, Barber and René Pomeau, the author of La Religion de Voltaire, all seem to me to underestimate the virulence of the work. Morize writes:
The world is in shambles, blood flows, Jesuits and Molinists rage, innocents are slaughtered and dupes exploited; but there are in the world delicious asylums, where life remains possible, joyous, and sweet: let us cultivate our garden.
This suggests an ability to shut out the spectacle of the world which Voltaire never possessed... According to Barber:
p159 The practical philosophy to which Candide finally attains is the application to the limited field of personal activity of that esperance {hope} which Voltaire had offered to humanity on a transcendental level in the conclusion of the Poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne.
In rejecting the doctrines of Pangloss and his like . . . he is seeking . . . a safe foundation in an insecure world for that profound belief in the value of activity which is characteristic of European man and was particularly strong in him.
Am I mistaken in reading a bit of Faust into that?
... There is no evidence in Candide, and very little in his biography, that he [Voltaire] had a profound belief in the value of activity. He believed in man's need for activity and he himself had a tremendous urge to be active... Would it not be more plausible to suppose that his feverish busyness was the only relief he could find for his acute awareness of evil? Pomeau speaks of the "epicurean motive for action which is the last word of the tale" and says that Voltaire "will make a philosophy of activity . . . A lesson revolutionary in its banality." No doubt, Voltaire borrowed the image of the garden from Epicurus, [Footnote: "Epicurus, the classical philosopher who made pleasure the supreme goal of life, had a famous garden where he lived an impressively moderate and contemplative existence {Editor}. Well put.] but he has no trace of Epicurean serenity or moderation.
I have to pause here... Faust and Goethe and Epicurus are shouting in my ear. Epicurus's garden was an alternative to the life of action, of seeking wealth and power and status. It was also a statement about the times in which he lived and reminds me of a quote from Confucius, "...When the Way does not prevail in your land, then count it a disgrace to be rich and honored." And this was exactly what Lucullus was doing when he returned from Asia -- though he dropped the moderation. Voltaire, at his estates around Geneva, does seem to have been living in this tradition, though more like Lucullus, with his theater and large dinner parties, and with a striving to transform the world through his writing that almost suggests Faust.
...
Only one critic appears to have stressed unequivocally the strength of the dark side of Voltaire's temperament, which is so obvious in Candide and in the correspondence. This is Andre Delattre, in his stimulating little book, Voltaire l'impetueux, where we read:
p160 It is only when, in Candide, he accepts certain perspectives of Pascal's, it is only when he ceases to strain against a dark and healthy pessimism, and ceases to hold open the empty sack of his optimism, that he finally creates, after his sixtieth year, his real masterpiece.
...Candide is not just a clever, unfair satire on optimism which concludes with the bracing recommendation that we should do what we can to improve matters in our immediate vicinity. It is a work in which an unappeasable sense of the mystery and horror of life is accompanied, at every step, by an instinctive animal resilience... [This sounds like The Brothers K] Voltaire has a faith, but it is not a political faith nor an easily defined religious one. It is the sort of faith that keeps the severed fractions of a worm still wriggling...
...
p162 ...Candide has, of course, a clear literary ancestry; he is adapted from the hero of the picaresque novel of adventurer... More immediately, he is Voltaire himself, who was declasse {a social outcast} like the picaresque hero, had been beaten and snubbed... {"trembled like a philosopher"} and had been frequently on the move. But he is also a symbol of the central part of the human soul which never loses its original innocence and, as Simone Weil says, always goes on expecting that good will be done to it rather than evil... he is {the outsider}, a fatherless bastard whose cozy sense of belonging to a coherent society and a comprehensible universe is a childhood illusion, soon to be shattered at the onset of puberty. Cunegonde is at first Eve who tempts him, with the result that he is driven out of the early paradise by the irate master of his little world. Then Conegonde becomes the symbol of a lost happiness which will be recoverable in the future, when the world falls again into some pattern reminiscent of the patriarchal social cell which preceded adulthood. But gradually it becomes clear that the world has no pattern... and the best Candide can do is to reconstitute the battered Westphalian society of his childhood as a refugee colony on the borders of barbarism, with himself as its disillusioned head... The second half [following the stay in El Dorado] is... different from the first in two important respects. Candide is no longer an underdog; he has acquired money and he sees the world from a new angle... The hero has mastered life to some small extent... but this... leaves him freer to contemplate the sufferings of others. ...Candide has become a spectator, but it is psychologically true... that adulthood involves awareness of general evil.
p163 ...Each [character] is killed once or more but bobs up again with heartening inconsequentiality. Voltaire expresses the strength of man's unconquerable soul by making Pangloss and the Baron... step out of the galley and begin at once behaving with characteristic foolishness... A minority of human beings are, like... [Candide], decent and well-meaning, the majority are selfish and stupid, but the implication is that all are involved in evil in more or less the same way. In this respect, Candide is both fiercely critical of human nature and curiously tolerant.
...
p166 ...it is remarkable that, in Candide, the distinction between evil which is an act of God (and therefore from the human point of view gratuitous) and evil which is an effect of human wickedness or stupidity, is not clearly maintained... [I have a problem with this distinction since I don't recognize the "evil" that derives from "acts" of God. For me, the significant thing here is that Voltaire is opposed to "the Church" and not a true atheist. Which point is made even more clearly if Pennsylvania is substituted for El Dorado.] It seems almost as if Voltaire were unwilling to come out into the open and accuse God... That happy country [El Dorado], where the inhabitants never quarrel and worship God without a church, does not provide a fair contrast with the ordinary world; how would the people of El Dorado retain their serenity if their capital were shattered by an earthquake? [There are any number of religions and philosophies that handle disasters of this sort well by subtracting the element of "evil" from them by denying God or through the fiction of a wrathful God.] The only way to justify the El Dorado chapters is to suppose that they are really a conscious or unconscious criticism of God. They occur as a sunny interlude... to show how happy and pious we might have been, had God not given us our ungovernable natures and put us into a world containing inexplicable evil... Voltaire, like Diderot, had not made up his mind about free-will, because the determinism/free-will dilemma is just another formulation of the God/no-God issue...
I don't see that at all -- though it might well have been true for them. What I do see is that no-God implies no-Evil, just as Dostoevsky feared.
...
p167 ...in this short tale... [Voltaire] managed to hold fundamental opposites in suspense and so produced, from the heart of a century that wished to deny evil, an allegorical prose poem about evil which is still perfectly apt... two hundred years later.
But only if you believe in God.
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