272. Still trying to become a better person

Before I resume A History of Europe...

Why I "green"

Of the many reasons I "green," the most difficult for me is the one I learned (again) this past weekend. The main reasons are that it's "good" work, in the Buddhist sense, and it both gets me out of the house to events I would otherwise never see, and it keeps me in good physical shape. These are the reasons that easily come to mind. But the other reason is just as important, if more difficult for me to remember.

I have a list of things I need to have with me when I leave the house for a greening gig. At the top of that list I've written in the largest letters, "CHILL." What I have in mind here are the annoying recycling scavengers and the annoying food vendors, two groups that make our work harder than it has to be. But there's yet another group that I need to chill about, and here's an example from this past weekend at Cinco de Mayo.

This one, dip-shit, event attendee decided the place to eat his lunch was sitting right next to one of our eco-stations with the pizza box holding his food actually resting across two of the eco-station box containers (landfill and compost). Not only was his pizza box blocking me from cleaning out the station, but the chair he was sitting on all but blocked me from approaching the eco-station. To get past him, I had to lift the almost full compost bag I was carrying over him and his pizza. He took exception to this. And he was right, I was being an ass-hole. 

This is a prime example of a situation where I should just chill. It isn't that important and, as satisfying as it was, my actions were unprofessional. Fuck-wittery will always exist and reacting to it doesn't help. I can blame the fact I was running late for my lunch break, but regardless, this is something I need to work on. 

Otherwise, the event went smoothly. My favorite crew chief was working the event so, at the end, I felt fine taking over my end of the street and directing the others in closing down our stations. With anyone else I would have needed to clear it with them, but J___ and I are always on the same page with things like this. I had the busier half of the event, yet we wrapped up first and then helped the others shut down the other half. And thus more recycling and compost was diverted.

Tomorrow, back to Pirenne... I'm almost sure.

P.S.

I'm still procrastinating, not sure why. Anyway, last night I had another dream that featured one of my parents -- not my mother, which would have been appropriate since tomorrow is Mother's Day. There's certainly nothing surprising about frequently dreaming about your parents, but what is a little uncanny is when you wake up, or semi-wake up, and remember -- have to reestablish in your mind -- that they are actually dead. I'm sure this is devastating for parents who have lost their children. 

There is a period of time, in these situations, when your mental assertions do not seem particularly convincing, given the evidence of the dream you are still coming out of. You think, could I be wrong about this? Which is the dream? 

I remain grateful that in my dreams my parents are always the people they were, not what they had been reduced to at the time they died. Dostoevsky, in The Brothers K, insists that people become most themselves as they approach death. I have yet to witness this. But even if that actually happened, would you want to remember people in your dreams the way you had known them all your life, or the way they had been for a brief time just before death? 


And here are some random photographs. First the Salesforce Tower. Not sure if they are entirely finished inside, but this is the way the exterior is going to look,

Then something I've noticed in the past but never had my camera with me to capture. See if you can figure out what this is,

Below should be easier to make out,

And below here it should be even more obvious,

Someone really did a good job removing every last bit of paper from the fliers and other items stapled to this post.

230. A walk 'round SOMA

Almost winter 2017

I felt like a nice long walk today -- we have a long gap in the rains that finally arrived -- so I did my little architectural tour of SOMA. Here are some highlights.

A view of Salesforce Tower from Market, looking like an actual building,

Looking south down 1st street with Salesforce Tower on the left and the trees in the park now visible atop the Transbay Transit Center,

The other side of Salesforce (now on the right) with the start of the tram system that will lift people from this plaza up to the top of the TTC at the left,

Official details of the TTC,

The trains in the basement are a joke as there's no funding for either system, and the High Speed Rail scheme probably won't survive the end of this final Brown gubernatorial administration.

Yet another tower going up on the north side of the Temporary Transbay Terminal,

The support tower for the bus roadway that links TTC with I-80 and the Bay Bridge,

The completed (east) end of the new Moscone South extension. The phase that's now underway might be a little more attractive,

I do like that they left the seismic structure visible to some extent,

Phase 2 just getting started. Here you can see most of the seismic structure that I'm sure will be hidden when the building is completed. If I read this correctly, this will be a large atrium space tying the wings together and leading down to the main, subterranean hall,

This wall will probably be opened up when the new structure is finished,

213. City streets

Life resumes

My day-after-HSB rest day is now past (I really didn't have any kind of cramps or post event distress, yay!) and I started the top-to-bottom cleaning of my building. It's still a little smoky here due to all the wild fires up north, but the wind is changing now and it's getting cooler -- good cleaning weather.

There's actually a number of HOA tasks on the near horizon. End of the year documents to create, our annual fire inspection to schedule. When I get home I'm going to test our emergency lights again. Really, it doesn't amount to that much. I need a new book.

Some things that have been sitting in my notes for a while now...

SOMA

Sitting at the 4th street Peet's, needed a little oak and granite. Walked here the long way through the middle of the Financial District and the new "Downtown" SOMA. Work is progressing on Salesforce Tower and the Transbay Transit Center but neither is on the cusp of opening. 

Walking past some other projects that are still in early stages of construction, I was thinking that the best thing about the over budget Transit Center is that it gave the authorities political cover for going higher-density than SF is usually comfortable with. It's still too soon to be able to envision what this new neighborhood will look like when built out in (maybe) ten years, but it will be something new for SF.

And while I'm downtown, here's something I wrote about cities. 

Why I love cities

And by cities I mean truly urban streets. Yesterday my plan had been to eat lunch and work in a cafe out by Lincoln Park, but I had forgotten they only accept cash and I didn't have enough cash for lunch. I had enough for iced tea and a snack, and that was fine.

But today I walked down to the Peet's on Market (because I also need to buy some more septic-tank-cleaning-enzyme-stuff) and, when I got in line I realized I had even less cash and using a card for under $5 is just silly. But this is downtown and my bank has ATMs directly across Market, and there's even one of the grand, older branches a block away. In fact, I have the option of at least a half dozen Wells Fargo ATM machines within about a block radius. 

Yesterday I could have paid a fee and used a third party ATM machine if I was desperate, but in a proper city the services you want tend to be magically available thanks to the "invisible hand" of the free market. (I'm misusing Adam Smith's concept here, but just a little. And, while not affirming his theory, my variation -- that business entities, while attempting to maximize their business, end up providing services where they are most wanted, I think is true and is particularly visible in urban areas. Starbucks -- I'm looking at one directly across the street -- is the best example of this at the moment. A block from here there are two Starbucks locations directly across 4th Street from each other. One has been there forever and serves the convention trade and people flowing in and out of the massive parking garage that houses the cafe. The other is new and associated with the Target store. They both look busy every time I'm in the area.)

This is why it drives me nuts when neighborhood interests reject increased density for fear of traffic. Yes, "traffic," in the sense of cars on the road doesn't effect me personally because I don't have a car, but traffic in the sense of people, foot-traffic, on the streets is the main factor in determining the value of urban real estate. 

And, Yes, developments like La Defense are a spectacular and indefensible waste of foot-traffic density. But here, around Union Square, most of the buildings and the urban design is 19th century (pre-City Beautiful!) and the exorbitant cost of real estate has driven landlords to maximize rents by creating as much retail space as possible accessible to the sidewalks. The best example of this being the Metreon, which had to be completely redesigned to take advantage of all the sidewalk frontage they were wasting.

The worst frontage wasters in the area now are the convention center and some of the newer hotels, but even the Hilton is attempting to do what Macys did and rent out spaces on their perimeter to retail tenants. Unfortunately for them, they are on the Tenderloin side of Union Square and, for the moment, much of their foot traffic is interested mostly in their chemicals of choice and social services.

163. It's been a while

Previous - 162. Becoming Wise

Link to Table of Contents

Sorry to leave you hanging if you were at all interested in Becoming Wise. This pause was not planned.

Becoming Wise

p162 Western Christianity lost some of the cleansing power of mystery when it became a bedfellow with empire and later, again, in its headlock with science. I sensed a discomfort in my grandfather at his own large and active mind, a nervous reluctance to acknowledge things the Bible did not or could not explain. For they might be delivered over to science's godless certainties, and then they were lost to the faithful forever...

p163 As this century opened, physicists, cosmologists, and astronomers were no longer pushing mystery out, but welcoming it back in...

p226  Shane Claybourne claims that "spittin' image" is shorthand for "the spirit and image." I like that. But does it really work if no one remembers that's what it means?


What I'm getting in all this is that Tippett -- even more perhaps than Lamott -- sees faith as a tribal human characteristic. It's something that binds groups together, often in opposition with other groups. The Amish and Ultra Orthodox Jews and Wahabi Arab women are like the tribal peoples who wear neck-rings or lip-plates. The fashions they use to distinguish themselves from others are arbitrary -- as are all fashions. What is important is that they adhere to the tribal fashion.

The tricky part when it comes to religion is, how to you sell the fashion to the young of the tribe without making judgements against outsiders? Can you say, "This is completely meaningless and stupid but it's this thing we do"?

And beyond that, can you say, Our religion and our God is this wonderful thing we've made up and we're better for believing it, but, you know, don't try to peek behind the curtains?


And she never does even touch on the problem of evil. To be fair, the kind of faith described in the previous paragraph doesn't require confronting that problem. Religion is simply one of the ways we deal with the evil we run into. If your God is pretend you can sidestep so many tiresome meta-ethical problems. 

She does talk very briefly about people who were recent victims of evil, secular martyrs. (Secular in that they didn't suffer and die for their faith, exactly.) Still, I don't think -- in a book like this -- you can just pass over evil without comment. 

Dostoevsky was not arguing for a pretend God, so he, through Ivan Karamazov, spent a great deal of time talking about evil. But did he come up with a neat explanation or justification? Didn't he just leave it at mystery? Both Dostoevsky and Tippett I think hope the problem will go away when people get in touch with their inner vulnerability. To which Michel Foucault says, "Ha!" Or to stick to The Brothers Karamazov, Pavel, de Sade's stand-in (or the straw-man representing de Sade), says, "Ha!" 

Martha Grimes mysteries

Here's something I can't explain, when I put back the books on my "featured fiction" shelf, there wasn't room for them all. I had to pick a title to remove and noticed a Richard Jury mystery, The Lamorna Wink that I didn't remember. I'm reading it now and I really don't think I've read it before. I'm around a third into it and so far Jury has not really been in it, it's all about Melrose Plant. 

In every Jury mystery Grimes has to visit her characters in Northants and in London, and we just wrapped our short visit to London where everyone, including Cyril the cat, are mostly just waiting for Jury to reappear. 

I'm not complaining, I was wondering when we would see Cyril, and it was nice to finally get some crucial backstory on Melrose. There's a murder and a disappeared person and we still haven't a clue what Jury is doing in Ireland. All that is fine, I'm reading slowly and just enjoying going where Grimes wants to take me. 
 

Photo update

Time passes. Here's how Salesforce Tower has progressed,

Before.

Now.

And here's how the work on the Van Ness BRT is coming along. The median is entirely removed and paved over except where the few trees are being preserved. It looks pretty silly,

Before.

Now.

The Road to Character by David Brooks

I'm still not sure how best to deal with this book. This is why I have not been posting for a while now. I want to build up a backlog so I can post regularly once I start up again, but wasn't sure how much detail I wanted to get into. 

This book is building up and cross-pollinating in a way that I'm not even sure is conscious to the author. Either he is being very stealthy about bringing up some interesting theological concepts, or he is accidentally bumping into things that I see connections between but he doesn't. The smart thing would be to wait until I've read it all and then go back and blog as I make a second pass through the material... so that's off the table.

I'm going to go ahead and post what I have as I complete my first pass with the understanding that I will be coming back to some of this later. My other problem is that Christian minutia relating to Augustine and Jansen (that I have so little interest in parsing) seems to be as central to this as are the more interesting (to me) religious ideas of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. And if I can paraphrase Clausewitz, this book could be viewed as The Magic Mountain's "regieren" by other means. And with Brooks arguing Naphtha's position. 

Again, I can't tell how conscious the author is of all this. I'm pretty sure Dostoevsky would be appalled by some of the people presented as exemplars. Though this would be less true of Naphtha. (I'm almost at the end now and am even more puzzled by Brooks's actual position. Either he's oblivious or using misdirection to prevent us from seeing what he's actually arguing for.)

In any event, I can promise you a return of the Port Royal gang, or at least some of their core ideas, yet another questioning of the secular, bourgeois world order, another pass at George Eliot, and some great stuff about Montaigne -- who keeps popping up, or rather who has occasionally shouted something or other from off-stage, but now can finally take a bow.

Next - 164. The Road to Character

154. The Sutra...

Previous - 153. Violation

Link to Table of Contents

Still Violating

"On Being Text"

When you pick up a collection of essays you can't really expect anything in particular, but I have to say that this is not what I was expecting from Tisdale -- not that I'm complaining at all. This essay begins talking about the academic penchant for bundling writer's together into anthologies for educational purposes. Tisdale starts by seeing it as a not unappreciated new source of income, but then goes on (after noticing that one editor has botched her biography) to actually read the collections. She also reprises her ad hoc education -- dropping out of high school and weaving through several universities, where she took no "literature" classes -- before finally getting a degree.

p234 ...the moment the students finish reading, they must start to dissect. I'm afraid that what the students of these books are really learning is what college students learn about so many subjects: how to take things apart, but not how to put them together.
...

p236 ...Literary analysis begins by presuming that writing can be understood by understanding its parts. The process is, in fact, called dissection, a term usually applied to dead things.
...

...Reading my own critics has taught me a little bit about my work and rather a lot about certain critics.
...

p240 How would I change college literature classes?... Read, read, read, and then try to explain how it feels. Read a book because someone you like tells you it's a good book. Listen to other readers when they react. Read some more. I believe that one reason I learned to write is that no one ever really tried to teach me, or... no one ever tried to tell me what a writer was supposed to be like...

p241 [From her note at the end of the essay] ...Anthologies give us a window into everything wrong with how we teach writing -- and reading -- and how one is actually read. It's not pretty.

I did take literature and history and philosophy classes, but I still agree with her. A good university philosophy department is the place to go to have your interest in philosophy deflated. And Thomas Mann, another autodidact, would agree with her as well. Academia (you would think) would be a magical place where people really cared about these topics, that few people in general care about, but instead it is where interest goes to die.

There's a great deal more here that I could have quoted, it's interesting to see an author respond to what is said about her writing by "professional" critics. What does please me is who Tisdale finds herself grouped with in these anthologies, Thurber and White and the other writers she mentions here. That would be nice.


"Twitchy"

What a great essay title. I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with Tisdale's categorization as a memorist... even though I think she's the one who suggested it. Her subject is life and she starts with herself, as we all do. Since we keep coming back to subjectivity, how nothing can really be known objectively, what isn't memoir to some extent? 

This essay is about, or at least starts with, a trip to the dentist to have her spectacularly bad teeth worked on. This requires a great deal of nitrous oxide which seems to be Tisdale's drug of choice. 

My teeth are as good as Tisdale's are bad, and yet a moment of wild abandon with a nutty biscotti at a delightful garden party last Sunday left me without the sole -- massive -- filling in my mouth. In fear the tooth would collapse if I forgot and put pressure on it, I rushed to the dentist the next day and had it refilled. Over $400 for those of you keeping score at home.

So I just this week spent time in a dentist's chair-of-discomfort. I wasn't offered nitrous. My iPod is on it's last legs so that's not an option. So I just had to lie back and be thankful this only happens about once a decade.

I was given nitrous once when three wisdom teeth were to be extracted without any other general anesthesia. I don't recall it doing anything. (And I don't recommend having your wisdom teeth pulled like that.) But what Tisdale's nitrous experience does remind me of is the intravenous anesthesia I got when they extracted the rogue wisdom tooth that somehow traveled sideways into the next tooth, leaving the cavity my massive filling is a reminder of. I was conscious but unconcerned with what was happening in my mouth. My thought processes didn't seem (to me) to be affected -- compared, for example, to drinking a bottle of wine -- and there was no hang-over or aftereffect when the procedure was over. I was told I was going to get a Valium IV, and I think I took a Valium before, but at the last minute there was a change of plan which I never quite understood, so I don't really know what they gave me, except that it wasn't what my friends had gotten that knocked them out, left them groggy, and finally resulted in vomiting later on. 

Tisdale goes on to explain her phobia in terms of scary childhood dental work from her (step)grandfather. But what she is averse to is what I dislike as well, the smell and sounds, the surprising pressures, and, for me, the discomfort of simply holding my jaw wide open for so long (that was the worst part of the three wisdom tooth extraction.) If I had access to Valium, and knew I was getting my work done ahead of time, I would have dosed myself up the same way Tisdale uses nitrous. By the time I need to get this filling replaced, I will have forgotten all this again.

She describes an annoying friend who goes to the dentist eager to learn if his flossing has paid off. I'm so much worse than this. Not only do I floss but I use these special little brushes between my teeth. My goal in life is to have the hygienist say, "There's nothing here for me to do" and run off sobbing. And I'm getting closer and closer each year. And yet I react to hearing the words "root canal" about the same way she does. 


"The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies"

Finally! This was my introduction to Sallie Tisdale and it is so unlike everything else I've read by her. For one thing it's as much about Buddhism as it is about flies. It's the only place where she really gets philosophical. And it's like a concise version of Annie Dillard's A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek when it comes to the amorality of nature.

What I noticed this reading is something that Dostoevsky would have loved. Near the end she writes at length about the role flies and their progeny play in decomposing bodies. Then, talking about the Buddha, she writes this, 

p311 ...What lucky flies smelled the flowery scent of the Buddha's death, and came -- flowing through the air like a river in the sky, a river of flies? What lucky maggots were born in his body, in the moist heat of the afternoon while the disciples still mourned? The maggots and blowflies are the words of the old Buddhas, singing of the vast texture of things, a lullaby of birth and death. They came and turned him into juice and soil, the Buddha flowing gloriously like cream into the ground.

I'm thinking about the shocking (to the monks) decomposition of Father Zossima shortly after his death. Of course, I'm not sure this works with what Dostoevsky intended this to mean. But it would seem that Zossima would have enjoyed the interpretation. 
 

Ugly

Yesterday I was looking at some photos taken looking down from the top of Salesforce Tower. This got me thinking about when architects decided that the tops and bottoms of skyscrapers didn't matter? (Or, if we think of the architects as thinking like toddlers, that we can't see the tops, at least.) 

In one shot, there was a great view of the Shell Building and several other handsome structures from the École des Beaux-Arts period of architect education. These structures still appear as perfect sculptural constructions, as neatly designed at the top as where they meet the sidewalk. By contrast, many of the glass, curtain-wall monoliths from the 1960 and 1970s (and beyond) have unsightly mechanical tumors on their flat roofs while their bases seem completely arbitrary. If it weren't for the larger height of the street level floors, you would think that the entire tower was simply extruded out of the ground like a plant shoot with an undifferentiated stem. The few postmodernist structures here do a bit better at the top, but recently they seem to have gone back to pretending no one can see up there. I'll give César Pelli credit for giving Salesforce Tower a better top, but then it's intended to be a focus and focal point for the whole city.

The Shell Building is the petite tower in the left foreground between two flat-topped towers. There are more, old buildings from the early 20th century above and to the left between Shell and the dark mass of the BofA Tower. The other standout tower is the Russ Building. Sadly, the building that houses my gym is just out of the frame to the left of the Russ. The round tower middle right, is Phillip Johnson's 101 California. The dark, part flatiron, part round little tower just this side of 101 California has residential on top, but I don't know it's name. The former First Interstate Bank building is dead center, partly in front of the TransAmerica. The First Interstate building includes a hotel on top and was built in the middle of the block with connection to the streets on three sides, but with the other, older, buildings in that block left in place. It's my favorite large scale development in the city because it integrated itself so subtlety into the neighborhood.

Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building does have a blunt and unsightly top but no tumors sticking up above. The way it meets the ground is a classic example of being too playful with steel and the weightless effect it can give. Like Wright and the Guggenheim, it would appear that van der Rohe also had no sense for urban life.

About the same can be said for SOM's Lever House, especially at the top. The base is better if only because it fills it's site. It's still more a celebration of steel and glass then it is something that belongs in a city.

It would seem that architects started with those examples and then simplified and made the buildings cheaper. Even the BofA tower here, which I think is an unusually handsome tall building, has protruding mechanicals rising from the top and a Seagramesque retreat from the street. I suspect one of the reasons the TransAmerica Pyramid has become so famous is that it is almost Postmodern in the way it avoids both the top and base problems, at least visually. The base is still a sterile zone in an otherwise vibrant neighborhood. I give it a pass as an instance of architectural sculpture, rather like the Burj Khalifa.

Painting a wall

I've been thinking about re-painting a wall in my living room for about six months and it's finally warm enough to have my windows open for a couple days. This evening I moved everything out of the way -- not a simple task in such a small apartment. It went about 90% the way I anticipated, which is surprisingly good. I had forgotten that I had velcroed my mirror to the wall, which makes that part of the job much easier than I was anticipating. On the other hand, I underestimated how much space my over-a-hundred-year-old desk and bookcase would take when I pulled it out. So I didn't move it as far as I planned. (I had already moved a chair out of the way to make room for the desk, and moving it back is impossible, so the chair clogs up my kitchen unnecessarily. Still, all in all it went well.

Tomorrow I will prep and prime. Tuesday I will paint and then move everything back. I've already added on a side project of putting something lighter in color at the back of the old shelves which I use as a display space. That should make my featured artifacts more visible. Maybe. We'll see.

Next - 155. Last of Tisdale

149. Candide, God, and Evil

Previous - 148. Kafka and memory

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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.

Next - 150. Original sin