Never Trouble Your Head

face

The other day I was accused of looking at the world “with a resigned shrug”.

“Most things”? Indeed, I think there are plenty of things worth no more than a shrug.

Voltaire says it far better than I could, especially in the concluding chapter of Candide. There’s a brilliant, free audio book, it’s well worth a listen if you have a couple of hours.

After thirty chapters of amusingly improbable disasters Candide and his friends end up in Constantinople (why Voltaire uses the old name of the city that fell to the invading Ottoman Empire over 300 years before he was writing I do not know – we just have to go with it.) He’s been swindled out of most of the extravagant wealth given to him by the King of El Dorado, but has enough left to buy a small farm and live comfortably. He is with his best friends, Pangloss the optimist (“all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds”), Martin the cynical, stoical realist, and his prudent servant Cacambo. He has just ransomed his long lost love, Cunegonde, out of slavery, along with her companion, The Old Woman, and got married. All in all not a bad situation considering the nightmare they have all just survived. It would be natural to imagine that they “must have led a very happy life.”

But that’s not how it turns out.

1 July 2016 170038 BST

Instead of enjoying their good fortune they spend their time bickering about “metaphysics and morals”, arguing over the spectacle of Byzantine public life passing beneath the farmhouse window. “Boats full of Effendis, Pashas and Cadis going into banishment”, replaced by an endless supply of willing politicians, pundits and petty bureaucrats, who in turn are turfed out of office and have their “heads decently impaled.”

Candide and his friends would have enjoyed our round the clock media coverage of the referendum and leadership battles. Boris learned a thing or two from his classical education.

When they aren’t squabbling about current affairs they get tremendously bored. The Old Woman eventually asks them a question, a philosophical poser based on experiences from their recent misadventures (Note, Voltaire is a dead, white male, writing before dead white males knew any better. You might want to untie the ribbons on your safe space and open a bag of flumps before you read the next bit if unpleasant opinions render you a jibbering wreck.)

which is worse

“It’s a great question,” says Candide. And it’s one that’s still worth asking; is it better to get caught up in the rat race, crushed by the wheels of industry, or be bored to death in a stagnant backwater? Martin’s conclusion, one that I tend to identify with, is not a solution it’s a cynical shrug; “man was born to live either in a state of distracting inquietude or of lethargic disgust.” Competitive rat or lazy rat; either way life is verminous, and you have to try hard not to be a total rat all the time.

Finally they decide to consult an expert, a local Dervish, “the best philosopher in all Turkey.” They ask some questions about why the world is not better organised to satisfy our individual wishes. The Dervish slams the door in their faces.

During this discussion they hear news that “two Viziers and the Mufti had been strangled at Constantinople, and several of their friends had been impaled.” The next sentence still makes me laugh.

“This catastrophe made a great noise for some hours.”

Voltaire neglects to mention it but no doubt someone got up a petition.

Then comes the well known ending of the book. The friends are walking back home when they meet an old chap “taking the fresh air at his door under an orange bower.” Pangloss asks him what he knows about the guys who just got garroted.

constantinople

With a shrug he invites the strangers Pangloss, Martin and Candide into his house. There his two daughters and two sons “presented them with several sorts of sherbet, which they made themselves.” Home-made sherbet! Several kinds of it. Made without a juicer or electricity or even a fridge. Happily shared with strangers without even thinking, along with “Kaimak enriched with the candied-peel of citrons, with oranges, lemons, pineapples, pistachio nuts and”, my favourite item, which I’d love to try, “Mocha coffee unadulterated with the bad coffee of Batavia or the American Islands.”

I have no idea what that bad Batavian coffee is – I’m sure nobody would serve it in any of our fine independent coffee shops in town – but the point is that this simple, ordinary, normal family manages to serve a decent brew and share a good spread with a bunch of complete strangers (immigrants too, with a different complexion, culture and religion, as if that point had to be made.) Considering what was going on in Constantinople this is nothing short of miraculous.

Candide, obviously impressed by the hospitality of “the honest Turk”, wants to know his secret.

twenty acres

Twenty acres? If that’s the thing then we are all doomed. My garden is barely big enough to contain two wheelie bins and a couple of planters. Same for most of us. So if the famous final line of Candide is the message, and we must simply “cultivate our own gardens” then we are all going to hell in a Pound Shop plant pot.

But it’s the other thing the old chap says, and more importantly his example, that I think is most relevant now; “never trouble your head with what is going on in Constantinople”. Shrug, and spend your energies where it most counts, work at what you are good at, share your best with anyone who comes your way, and don’t pay any attention to the goings on of those Byzantine Boris’s. As the honest Turk says, “they probably deserve it.”