We must cultivate our garden
by Bob on November 16, 2007
There is a quote from the book "Candide" by Voltaire which says "We must cultivate our garden".
The actual quote from Pangloss to Candide in French from Chapter XXX is "Je sais aussi, dit Candide, qu'il faut cultiver notre jardin".¹
It then goes on that Man was put in the Garden of Eden with all its plentitude but was not meant to be idle, but had to cultivate the garden.
That is a very profound statement by Voltaire as are many of his statements.
We must learn to cultivate things, not to let them go fallow.
This is true of friends -- we must work hard to keep our friends -- jobs, marriages, and just about anything else.
But in the nature of man and also especially in our post-industrial society and world, there is now very little tendency to cultivate much of anything, since our world is a very passive world now. People in front of the television for far too many hours, sitting somatised as Aldous Huxley predicted, in front of a computer screen, and such habitudes.
There is a part of Man's nature which is industrious, not idle. But we live in a modern world of idle time. Too much idle time.
Real and appropriate idle time is important. For a train engine and motor, it needs rest and idle time or it will overheat and burn out. So with people too. We need some idle time to avoid burning out, in the form of leisure time.
Leisure is becoming synonymous with sloth, which is not its intent or meaning. Proper leisure is enjoyable and yet critical to our health, mentally and physically.
Sloth in the form of too much free time or over-used idle time is very malignant to society at large. Nothing would get built or it would be sloppily built if people were lazy. Things wouldn't work, or would break easily.
Now if we stretch the metaphor a bit, we get to the issue of cultivating our own internal and spiritual gardens. It is like the symbolic quest of the Alcehmist to make gold out of base metals. But their task was far more profound than that. It had to do with spiritual alchemy, to develop one's being into something transcendent.
Joni Mitchell wrote and sang in her song "Woodstock", a paean to the 1969 festival in upstate New York, that:
Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe its the time of man
I dont know who l am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And weve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Yes, so besides getting back to the Garden we also need to cultivate it as Voltaire wrote. It's the work of repairing the Universe, Tikkun, or as Godfrey Reggio put it in his brilliant 1982 film "Koyaanisqatsi" the world and life is out of balance, as per the Hopi prophecies.
And meanwhile I am sitting here reading a Mathematical Physics paper titled "An explanation and some extensions of the Ciesielski-Taylor identities". ²
We must remember how to cultivate our garden again.
* * *
¹ from Candide, Chapter XXX:
Candide, en retournant dans sa métairie, fit de profondes réflexions sur le discours du Turc. Il dit à Pangloss et à Martin : « Ce bon vieillard me paraît s'être fait un sort bien préférable à celui des six rois avec qui nous avons eu l'honneur de souper. -- Les grandeurs, dit Pangloss, sont fort dangereuses, selon le rapport de tous les philosophes : car enfin Églon, roi des Moabites, fut assassiné par Aod ; Absalon fut pendu par les cheveux et percé de trois dards ; le roi Nadab, fils de Jéroboam, fut tué par Baaza ; le roi Éla, par Zambri ; Ochosias, par Jéhu ; Athalia, par Joïada ; les rois Joachim, Jéchonias, Sédécias, furent esclaves. Vous savez comment périrent Crésus, Astyage, Darius, Denys de Syracuse, Pyrrhus, Persée, Annibal, Jugurtha, Arioviste, César, Pompée, Néron, Othon, Vitellius, Domitien, Richard II d'Angleterre, Édouard II, Henri VI, Richard III, Marie Stuart, Charles Ier, les trois Henri de France, l'empereur Henri IV ? Vous savez... -- Je sais aussi, dit Candide, qu'il faut cultiver notre jardin. -- Vous avez raison, dit Pangloss : car, quand l'homme fut mis dans le jardin d'Éden, il y fut mis ut operaretur eum, pour qu'il travaillât, ce qui prouve que l'homme n'est pas né pour le repos. -- Travaillons sans raisonner, dit Martin ; c'est le seul moyen de rendre la vie supportable. »
* * *
² "An explanation and some extensions of the Ciesielski-Taylor identities" in Lectures in Mathematics, "Some Aspects of Brownian Motion: Part I: Some Special Functionals", ETH Zurich, 1992.