Not far from my desk stands a shelf of books that rescue me when I tire from swimming in my deep pool of ignorance. Some are about philosophy and philosophers. I appreciate this discipline but just cannot keep its periods and problems straight in my mind. I can’t remember what Kant could, I discarded Descartes when I realized one must be a mathematician to follow his reasoning, and while I have a great regard for Kierkegaard, I simply lack the ability to track through all that grave German philosophy he understands in his dark, Danish way.

As composers do, philosophers win my admiration. But if admiration requires remembering who said or wrote what in which century, I falter. I simply cannot remember. With one exception: Voltaire.

I remember Voltaire because while reading work by him and about him, I laughed. Voltaire was an eighteenth-century Frenchman impressed with the English and usually in trouble with authorities in Paris. Because of him, I remember yet another, slightly earlier philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz. I recall a seminary professor mentioning him and learning then that German diphthongs get the sound of the second vowel. From seminary I learned to say correctly Leibniz. But I remember what Leibniz believed and what Voltaire thought of it because I laughed.

Not humorously, Leibniz explained our world in terms of substances and strivings and sufficient reason, and concepts and consequences farbeyond my comprehension. He theorized that ours is the best possible world. God, he says, created it precisely as it isbecause as it is, it is the best of all possible worlds. I vaguely recall a discussion of this in my hermeneutics class. You can, no doubt, understand my never giving it a thought once grades were rewarded. That is, until I borrowed a copy of Voltaire’s Candide.

I must have been goldbricking or ice-skating while during my youth others were reading classics. But last winter, having finished the book I brought along and needing something to read in the short time of vacation remaining, I browsed among my daughter-in-law’s books. There stood Candide.Obviously a classic, it was small and worn. Courtney said, “You haven’t read Candide?It’s great.” 

Perfect. I picked it up and began at the introduction. Thank goodness for introductions, they serve as language instructors for those of us unfamiliar with the classical tongue. I learned quickly that Voltaire not only created characters, he was one. I laughed from the start when André Maurios introduced Voltaire as

            A dying man: he had been one all his life. But in his health, about which he was for ever complaining, he had a valuable prop which he used to wonderful advantage: for Voltaire’s constitution was robust enough to withstand the most extreme mental activity, yet frail enough to make any other excess difficult to sustain.

Selectively excessive himself, Voltaire responded to an era fraught with excesses by thrusting a sense of humor rather than the usual sword. For instance, by playfully constructing his tomb half inside the church and half in the graveyard at his Ferney estate, he symbolized his conviction that the “rascals” of the church “will say I’m neither in nor out.” He approved of God but abhorred and discounted superstition abounding in the church. He was a deist but kept a Jesuit father in residence at his retreat home (read ‘exiled’ home) in Ferney, near Geneva.

Voltaire deplored the despotism of nobility so common to his world and did something about it. The hamlet of Ferney and the lives of common people there were transformed by his establishing industry and commerce. He allowed religious tolerance. He provided homes for the townspeople, developed a center for the making of fine watches and lace, and employed workers in his own massive gardens and orchards. He was convinced that work “keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and poverty.”

I am not capable of essaying the good or evil contributed by Voltaire. I am not a philosopher, not a judge of any. I can only say that he won from me what no other philosopher has—my memory. His opposition to Leibniz, his sense of the futility of idle optimism, his strong advocacy of positive action and work all settled in my mind as if they belong there. Voltaire made me listen by making me laugh. Candideis a veryfunny book, a bawdy but fine satire. In it, Voltaire hurled accurately a weapon for minimizing opposition, for driving home a point, winning an audience, relieving frustration, easing tension, expressing humility, exercising power. His weapon? Humor. Or, if you prefer, and the English do, humour.

Coming up, section TWO, HAIL HUMOUR - Until the eighteenth century, humor came in four colors: red, yellow, black, and green . . . 

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