Pangloss sometimes said to Candide:
“There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron; if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.”
“All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden."
By Tom Swift
Staff Writer
“Let us cultivate our garden.”
What does this famous line in literature, authored by Voltaire, circa 1759, mean to us in 2024?
(Especially, I mean, for those of us who aren’t green-thumbed literalists.)
To set the scene of the classic novel in which the line appears, title character Candide, his sidekick Martin, his philosopher friend Pangloss, and love-of-his-life Cunegonde, over years and across continents, endure absurdities and perversities, violence and disease, tyranny and calamity. In short, they experience the pain of multiple lifetimes in condensed form.[1]
Finally, after encountering a wise Turk oblivious to the “news” of the day, unaware even of basic details of prominent people close to home, Candide arrives at some level of guidance about how to live.
Life is not about philosophizing for its own sake.
Life is not about solving the world’s problems.
Life is not about meddling in other people’s affairs.
Life is about taking care of our own damn selves.
While our gardens might, of course, be literal gardens — the Turk certainly puts his modest plot of land to use, raising food sufficient to sustain his family both gastronomically and financially — they don’t have to be. In fact, for most anyone reading these words, one’s physical garden is unlikely to play a central role.[2]
Which gardens do most of us have the opportunity to cultivate? One hack’s list:
1. Our minds
2. Our bodies[3]
3. Our living spaces
4. Our work
Before we consider each of these, in the spirit of Candide, I must disclose that I’m writing this post foremost to myself and for myself. Should a reader find in here any figurative finger wagging, she or he should go back to Pinterest or whence they came.
For if we are serious about cultivating our minds — turning to No. 1 on our list, first for a reason — it seems essential that we worry little about the doings of others. This would include their opinions of us.
“For the matter of that,” says Count Pococurante, one of the characters Candide encounters on his adventures who seems to have figured out a thing or two, “I say what I think, and I care very little whether others think as I do.” To be fair, the good count isn’t exactly the happiest of fellows; he doesn’t necessarily possess the secret of life. Yet it’s the case that he isn’t wrong, either. For to spend time regarding the behavior and views of others is, by definition, to not spend time tending to one’s own mind-space. Attention is zero-sum. We can pay attention to one thing or we can pay attention to another thing, but we cannot pay attention to two things simultaneously.[4]
Here we might say the aim is to actively not worry about the business of others. Not just to tolerate but to take steps to create distance. That is, don’t tell others what they should think about, well, really anything. Not even about the “good” things — our assumed enlightenment. Let others “be” such that we don’t even know what they are doing, much less that we become offended by what they are doing. “Be Kind” were the words stitched on the front of a woman’s sweatshirt as she passed me on the sidewalk recently, looking at me but otherwise wholly disregarding me when I raised my hand, smiled, and said, “hello.” Irony: It’s a new board game from Milton Bradley.
Of course, we care about our partners, our coworkers, our families, our friends (human and animal), and what these creatures do and say, inevitably, affects us. Otherwise, why engage with them at all? Even here, though, we do well not to go too far with our fantasies of influence — in either direction. If change is our goal the best thing we can ever be is a model. More importantly, if we require others to be a certain way, then that tells us we have an opportunity to do more work on ourselves. We don’t get that in this life — we don’t get to arrange the rest of the world to our liking. To try is to fail in this case and to fail is to perpetually have a garden in need of tilling.
In terms of public intervention, certainly when behavior crosses a line — behavior that violates an actual law, for example, or when we can see someone suffering from physical violence (yes, that is redundant; Col. Nathan R. Jessep: "Is there another kind?") — then, and really only then, should we intervene.
The lines from Candide cited above are the final ones of the novel. During a recent group discussion I attended, some smart readers laughed off the ending. In a fanciful tale to this point, one that for some hearkened Monty Python, the last lines seemed pithy. In fact, satire usually ends abruptly.
Maybe — maybe — Voltaire didn’t intend for a guy with a blog[5] to make much of his landing lines. Yet in them I read echoes of Epictetus and other Stoics who remind us to focus as much of our attention as possible on things we can control (and by “control” they didn’t mean influence; they meant truly control so, yes, we’re talking about a small list, one that excludes even our own bodies). It’s one thing to care about a societal issue — to put forth time and energy toward making a better world. That is all fine and good. Such action might well even be essential to the cultivation of our own minds; we might need to attend to the larger garden that is this earth expressly in order to be personally settled between our own ears. Here practical action should be the aim. When we require others to hold certain beliefs, we give those others control over our minds. I might campaign for a candidate or try to save the wales. But the state of my mind should not be dependent, day to day, on election polls or the health of specific sea mammals.
If we free our minds of the doings of other people, particularly those we don’t know and never will meet — if we’ve taken a scythe to the mental landscape, so to speak — what seeds do we plant in the available place?
Our daily inputs have great power. I forget this so often. All day long we experience a torrent of sounds and images and we think we’re helpless to so much of this when, in fact, we can, with effort, make healthful choices. What we feed our minds — and how much — is worthy of a great deal of effort.
Do I really want to listen to this pop song for like the 114th time?
If it’s taking me 33 minutes to decide which show to watch, is it the case I really want or need to watch a show at all?
If I’m bored for twenty-six seconds, do I really want to scratch the itch to pick up my “smart” phone, a device designed to capture my attention and scatter it, not only occupying my time right now but, worse, lessening my ability to focus later on the person before me, the book in my hands, the song of the blue jay in my tree?
Neuroscientists tell us that every action wires our brains. Every action. What we read, what we see, what we watch. All the information we consume and all conversations we undertake. Even the act of sifting through our own thoughts. Every. Thing. We. Do. We constantly create a new person. We make ourselves who we are. In this moment. And this moment. And this. For a lifetime.
Whoa.
If you look at my list of four “gardens” above the thing about the bottom three is that they are all inextricably linked to the first one.
Our minds need to be engaged in activity: we use our bodies for that (No. 2). We need a place to store those bodies (No. 3): our homes serve us here. And we need to engage in a specific undertaking (No. 4): this last item is, I think, the one in need of more explanation than the previous two.
Just before the final lines of Candide, our "hero" speaks to his travel companion:
“I know also,” said Candide, “that we must cultivate our garden.”
“You are right,” said Pangloss, “for when man was first placed in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, that he might cultivate it; which shows that man was not born to be idle.”
“Let us work,” said Martin, “without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable.”
We aren’t meant to be “idle.” We are meant to get into our bodies and apply our minds. Of course, the duality is false in any real sense. Yet there is some usefulness to regard them separately for the sake of thought experiments.
What is our Work? The prevailing paradigm in America is such that most of us have to do a job most of our adult lives. Our work (lowercase W), in that regard, is that for which we receive pay. For most, this work serves a specific, external master: the company, the boss, the organization. This “work” is of a collective rather than personal mission and the matter is, even if we get more than money from our performance, transactional.
This is not what I mean when I use the term above. Our uppercase-W Work is a thing that is life affirming. It speaks to us and shapes us and, you might say, aligns us with our true nature. In that, one’s work is personal. We might …
… raise a child.
… love a dog.
… tend a house.
… write a poem.[6]
One natural counterargument to this view just outlined would be that we’re not put on this earth to think only of ourselves. That we do well to look beyond or own containers, to live for the greater good. Whether we see the greater good as our family, our community, the country, the world, a god, whatever. This line of thinking speaks to me; I see narcissism all around and I don’t want to be just another navel-gazer.[7] Yet I think the idea is more about approach than activity. By taking care of myself, no one else has to, and by taking care of myself I have greater capacity to connect with things beyond me. I see the idea as one that calls forth a proper regard for externals, not as a lack of caring.
A possible pitfall is the tendency toward absolutism: to value only beauty, only the good. Who among us doesn’t prefer pretty flowers? Except it’s not possible, not even desirable, to create a space (literal or mental) free from the ugly. Every garden is going to have weeds. Recall that dandelions — those dreaded yellow heads we cutoff at first site each spring — have terrific cultivating properties.
I think Voltaire would agree. In Candide, he’s not making a case for nihilism. Life is a mess; it’s painful; it’s stressful; it’s uncomfortable. (That is, if we’re lucky!) So don’t dawdle. Tend your garden not only today and once, but tomorrow and ongoing.
What does my garden consist of? My Work is to arrange words in a way that creates order out of the chaos that is my mind. I hope, too, to express something in my writing that is of use to others. Toward this end, reading great writers helps me see clearer lines of language. Meditation helps, as well, in that I practice reacting less quickly and sharply to first impulses: fear, anger, hunger, desire (with, to be sure, mixed results). I also find that physically organizing something has a settling effect. The other day I took all my clothes, separated those I no longer needed and placed them in boxes for donation, and folded the previously disheveled keepers and placed them neatly in drawers. This small act left me in a pleasant, calm state.
For that is, I think, the aim: to get calm — deeply calm. Then I can hear what springs forth. To cultivate my garden is a way to reconnect with my path.
It’s a stretch to call the Internet a garden — and if it is one, it is, we might all agree, a garden with many invasive species — yet, I shall aim to see what additional work I can do, and in view, here in this virtual plot.
[1] And all in about 120 pages.
[2] No way anyone comes to UntetheredDog.com for gardening advice.
[3] You could say Nos. 1 and 2 are inseparable from one another and you won’t get argument from me.
[4] When we try we actually pay attention to nothing.
[5] Some 265 years later.
[6] Or a blog post.
[7] I am, frankly, not that interesting.
