Voltaire - A lot of Voltaire (Small Works List)

 I am chiming in here to say that I really messed up when I jumped into Voltaire. A story in three parts.

First, I pulled Voltaire from the Small Works List because, you know...why not? So, I wasn't sure what I was going to do here because I have read Candide before and it seemed to me that Candide is the document that you are supposed to read when you read Voltaire. So, I pulled the name and I thought, surely there will be something else that I should read to make myself understand this human being better. As I have mentioned elsewhere in this pursuit I have been reading classic literature since high school and have had an on again off again relationship with the canon as most traditionally expressed. What I find now is that I still have this sort of semi-fraught relationship with specific characters of the canon and I can think whatever I like about these people. I read Voltaire in high school and did not really understand what was going on then, I read it again recently and realized that I did understand what was going on there and did not like it.

Here's what happened: I pulled Voltaire and then read some of the Wikipedia entry on the man. His life seems strange and interesting and also exceedingly influential in his time in France. A great deal of very important things seem to be happening at and just before this time in France and so I am now getting a sense of the history of Europe through this project. I am reading War and Peace now and am getting a real wake up call for my deep lacking of a historical perspective.

Okay, so I pulled Voltaire and then went to Audible to see what was available for free on the site which often helps me decision process. On Audible, there was a free version of a combined text of Candide and Zadig read by the same reader. The whole thing was 6 hours long so I thought, why not, lets give both a try. I had a day that I could spend listening to both and so I jumped in. I listened to Candide, more or less, before lunch and was so deeply exhausted by that text that I put off Zadig for the next day. I turned on Zadig the next day and was still so terribly done with Voltaire that I thought perhaps I would just not finish Zadig and say that Voltaire from the Small Works List was done. I recorded a video response to this effect as well. 

I moved on to bigger and better things since this point, but felt this niggling feeling that I had not finished the thing itself and felt compelled to revisit this to close this chapter in the Random Number Lit saga. I had a clear and free hour of a drive to do and so I went back to Audible to see if there were any classic short stories perhaps put to audiobook and found, Lo and Behold, another work of Voltaire - "Micromegas." I was in luck.This would do it, like Rumplestilskin, I could say this man's cursed name and be done with the whole thing. I turned on the version available on Audible of "Micromegas," and realized that this recording was made to help people fall asleep, like a sort of slow, meditative reading of the text. It was a straight road. It was a rainy, steel gray morning. I turned on "Micromegas" and was enchanted by the experience. There may be something specifically special about that particular experience that is unique to my immediate situation, but beyond that I was glad to have read something I deeply enjoyed by Voltaire. There is still the curt, rapid nature of his prose that is present in Micromegas but the slowed, stayed reading of it sort of cut that away and I was able to sit with his mind for a still moment and see the brilliance of Voltaire's logic. Undressing some of the open hostility of Voltaire's top mind in the meditative reading of the text was very helpful in meeting the man in his own way. 

The third move here then is that after this chance encounter with "Micromegas," I went back and finished listening to Zadig which tripped back into not liking the man's writing, but I went on an adventure with Voltaire and I feel like I encountered this human being at an interesting level.

Here is the take away from this journey. I do not like Voltaire's writing or his sort of presentation of himself through his prose. I find him exhausting and irritating and deeply uncharitable. With that said, he has a brilliant mind and is a clever and clear writer. Without being able to accept or even really empathize fully with the underlying argument to his work, it stifles my ability to connect with the work. This is not always the case but his stories are so deeply situated in his writing, "message art" or something of the sort, and so if you know the message going in and are perhaps not so fond of said message, it can limit your experience of the overarching work. This is not an impossibility and so I trudged on towards the goal of meeting the man in the prose, and felt only through the most obscure sort of paths available I was able to. So, read "Micromegas," but only do so very slowly on the very edge of sleep, and you may find something magical there. 

 

So, in a weird intersection of these things, I found a blog that did a dazzling review of an adapted/illustrated version of Micromegas for children adapted by Elizabeth Hall. Now I am going down a rabbit hole that I may not make it back out of.