It was required reading in college, and this past week I pulled it down from the top of my bookshelf for a reread—Candide, the satirical and sometimes hilarious polemic by the 18th century writer Voltaire, which ends with the famous line “we must cultivate our gardens.”
Prior to that point in the book, however, the main character travels all over Europe and South America encountering scoundrels, cheats, thieves, shysters, hypocrites, bounders, murderers, liars, brutes, madmen and schemers. (Rather like the evening TV news.) Throughout, he remains ever optimistic, maintaining, as he has been taught by his tutor-philosopher Dr. Pangloss, that this is the best of all possible worlds.
But at the end, shattered by all the evil, injustice and calamity he has witnessed, he gives up pontificating for the simple pleasures of home and honest work.
It’s a message for the ages and a message for our time.
The first week in March, thousands of Chicagoans flooded Festival Hall in Navy Pier to see the first-rate gardens at the Chicago Flower & Garden Show. “Everybody is so hungry for spring,” was the oft-repeated comment.
But they were hungry for information as well. Chicagoland Gardening publisher Bill Aldrich, who coordinated the Show’s seminar schedule, reports that a total of 7200 people in all attended the daily presentations, and some popular speakers like Park Ridge daylily expert Greg Bartoshuk, drew a crowd of 291 and spoke to a standing-room-only room.
A few days later, the news story broke that the First Family is starting a vegetable garden at the White House, the first since the Victory Garden days of World War II. And there on the front page of many newspapers was the photo of Michelle Obama, rake in hand, doing her bit to dig out the lawn and replace it with an abundance of vegetables and herbs. How cool is that?
While it’s true that Americans return to vegetable gardening whenever there’s an economic downturn, I’m hopeful that this year our additional desire for safe, good-tasting, non-adulterated food that hasn’t traveled thousands of miles to reach us will mark a turning point in the way we live.
The times are out of joint, said Hamlet, and we have seen the truth of that in the news reports about subprime loans, Bernard Madoff’s humungous ponzi scheme, outrageously extravagant Wall Street bonuses. Like Candide, we are weary from what we have seen and just want it to go away. But it won’t. Not for a long time. In the meantime, we can all stay sane and reasonably content by cultivating our gardens.
