Bonus 34 - Candide w/Matt Burriesci

I really enjoyed this conversation, and I'm so happy you took on this novel. I read part of Candide back in high school, but I think I got distracted and never finished it (the perils of an ADHD brain). In your show I was struck again, as I was back then, by how well the comedy still works. I can only imagine how devastatingly funny it must have been in its original era, when readers would have understood all of the references without needing explanations. It must have been absolutely killer.

Ethan Cordray

Well I mean, Isaac Newton was a crazy alchemical occultist, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't care what he had to say about optics and gravity.

Ethan Cordray

I now remember that the last time I heard of Voltaire online was someone dismissing his free speech ideas with “who cares, he was an anti-Semite”. I’d basically forgotten everything about him but that one thing.

Jason Thompson

I have nothing to add other than the name of the video game should have to Candide Crush.

Always a joy to hear three friends kick around Candide. The pleasure you all took in the book and the conversation clearly shone through. It is, I'm sure, no great revelation to think about the structure of the book mirroring the structure of a life. The character-defining traumas and aesthetics of youth; the reckless adventuring of the newly adult; the achievements (and frequent losses thereof) of the full adult; the regrets of middle age; the final struggle; acceptance. If we buy that at all, we can think of the El Dorado section as, in fact, the best possible world that Candide should have stayed in. But because of his age, he is unable to accept what he has. He remains tied to the ill-considered goals of youth. He should never have left El Dorado. And that is just one of the human tragedies of this book.

Enlightenment Deism has always fascinated me. As someone who is part of an ethnoreligious minority (South Indian, St Thomas Christian), my religion and my culture aren't fully distinguishable but at the same time I'm not spiritual. Deism seems like a logical way to square the circle (which is why it crops up in the 18th century where, for example in the Anglo-American context, Anglicanism becomes in part more of a social identifier than necessarily a religion).

March is for Draculas! Hooray! It's my birthday in march. Can I choose a dracula?