#166. Candide (Wednesday, March 15, 2006)
What was your best day…of being impressed by how much you understood something?
To get the proper resonance of this story when you read it aloud, pronounce the title “can-DYED,” like I did—not the more linguistically appropriate “kon-DEED.” Despite ten years of French education and the book being written by one of France’s most famous thinkers, the latter still doesn’t sound right.
I entered this day, the third day of March Break in my sophomore high school year, not knowing a single thing about what Candide was. Or who he, or she, or it was. A real person, a fictional person, a city, an abstract philosophy, a rare seven-letter common noun I had somehow let slip through the cracks over fifteen years of life? All I knew was that it appeared on the Top 100 list of frequently referenced works in NAQT quizbowl questions—“the list” (#25), as I called it.1 That list would eventually help turn me into a literature specialist and, two years later, a Reach for the Top champion (#10, #1). At this point, though, I barely knew what half the supposedly famous books, plays, and poems were about. Knowing the authors was usually enough.
With nothing to do during March Break—and newly in my “hyper-ambitious” phase (#93), where a day off still had to feel productive—I decide to spend the day at the large downtown Chapters bookstore (#130). On the third floor, “Candide, by Voltaire” catches my eye. The title-author pairing triggers my list reflex, but what really surprises me is the spine: it’s thin. I had somehow imagined Candide as a mysterious 700-page epic. So I pull it out.
I start with the introduction about François-Marie Arouet—Voltaire—still half-expecting the actual text to be impossibly dense. Then I reach the first chapter:
In a castle in Westphalia, belonging to the Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, lived a youth, whom nature had endowed with the most gentle manners.
Well, besides that nonsensical proper noun, that’s a good start. Seems this book might actually be readable to me.
And it is. Candide is only about 36,000 words, and this English translation of a French book—which I somehow don’t consciously register at the time—is surprisingly easy to follow. Candide and his teacher Pangloss (whom I picture throughout as a centaur) ricochet around the world through increasingly absurd disasters, in one of the most unpredictable yet oddly followable plots I’ve ever read. Maybe the promised glory of finishing a Great Work of Literature in one sitting helps, but I barely move from the sofa by the window all day.2
I finish late in the afternoon, and it takes some time for my great accomplishment to hit me. I had just read a nearly 250-year-old quizbowl-certified classic book, and understood all of it—the events, anyway, not why Voltaire had written them that way or why the book deserved classic status. Had I become a true literature expert, a true philosopher in the span of a day?
Obviously not. But from then on, every book on that list, every famous philosopher or Renaissance celebrity who appeared in quizbowl, felt a little less intimidating. I was apparently allowed, at fifteen and largely ignorant, to enter this world of high-end artistic and intellectual objects and actually understand some of it. Having just devoured the magnum opus of one of the most mysterious writers I knew in one peaceful sitting, nothing felt completely off limits anymore.