Autor:    Julián Silva Puentes

THE CANDID OPTIMISM OF VOLTAIRE

I read somewhere that Voltaire wrote “Candide, or the Optimism” in a week. In fact, when you read this little book of the Titan from the age of the illustration, you perceive the spontaneity and joy that he must have felt when working on it, and that is why you imagine that he wrote it in one sitting. Now, whether it´s fun to read or not, is a matter of personal taste. What does depend on each one is to believe that, in effect, forced optimism is a way of denial even worse than the despair of pessimism, because the pessimist does not see things as they are, but worse than they are. In that sense, the pessimist is no better than the optimist, but at least he has the toughest skin when things, again and again, relentlessly, go wrong.

For no one to pay you to write, you need a very tough skin. It is not called “failed” but “work in progress”, to the poor devil who keeps climbing the mountain with a stone tied around his neck hoping to reach the top one day.

Now, that nobody pays me to write for hours, weeks, months and years, is a kind of rather silly optimism that I have not been able to shake. In that sense, I am as optimistic as the people I criticize or as the protagonist of Voltaire´s book, Candide, who, with his foolproof optimism, tries to convince the rest of the characters and even himself, that “all is well in the best of all possible worlds”.

Speaking of the best possible worlds, definitely not everything is going well in ours, because it is enough to go out into the street to see that, in effect, very few things, or almost nothing, is good. In the big cities it may be more evident than in the towns, but that does not mean that because we do not see it, it is not there.

At this moment I am in the kitchen of my house having a coffee and talking about the danger of false optimism. It´s raining outside and I like that when I don´t have to get on a Transmilenio packed to the windows. That it rains and I can be in the comfort of my home, while the world outside my window insults, pushes and threatens to get on the bus first, it´s something I don´t like about living here. I like that I earn well because in Bogotá they pay better than in the provinces. Of course, you leave very early in the morning and arrive until late at night, because the distances are definitely a problem. Also the people in the Transmilenio are. They insult you if you pass in front of them in line and they can throw you through the window to take your place. Not to mention the thieves. It´s been twice now that they take the alcohol spray from the side pocket of my jacket. I don´t think the thief was looking for such poor loot, because they usually go for the cell phone and the wallet, but with me they haven´t found anything of great value.

Speaking of the value of things, I wonder what value Voltaire would have if he lived in the 21st century. Very surely, “Candide, or the optimism” would have been something different from a short novel about someone to whom many bad things happen, but who continues to see life with optimism. “Candide, or the optimism” would be today a YouTube channel where a 40-year-old unemployed actress is filmed buying beauty products to talk as if she had invented them. She would give financial advice and film her young children doing somersaults for people to see how full her life is. She would say things like “You are a warrior of light” or, “Don´t let anyone steal your essence”. She would shoot 60-second stories with her husband on a boat on the Sena, or sitting on an elephant outside Bangkok, all the while smiling despite how bad elephants smell, and how wrong it is to chain an animal to take pictures.

Voltaire´s “Candide” would be a new kind of creature known as a tiktoker, to whom people pay a lot of money so that they can talk in public of their private lives and film themselves walking, eating, sleeping and doing somersaults like the monkeys do in the temple from Ubud to throw food at them.

The number of things that can be done on social networks with a cell phone are endless, as well as the money for those who know what people like to see and hear: about everything. When I say about everything, I mean that people enjoy watching and listening to anything in order to forget themselves. People enjoy seeing a man talking to himself, but changing clothes between takes to make it look like he´s talking to someone else who looks just like him, just in different clothes; he also enjoys watching a woman with face tattoos put on makeup while she talks about her sex life. Without any purpose, without any object, without any meaning, both the guy who changes his clothes and the woman with the tattoos, are recorded doing things that 20 years ago would have been branded as ridiculous.

Speaking of ridiculous things, in my latest writings I tell things about my personal life in the manner of influencers. I tell more or less what I do at my job, the long journey I have to travel between my home and the office, and what I did to earn a living when I lived outside of Colombia. I talk about situations where I don´t get off scot-free and feel ashamed of my inability to deal with the practical side of life. I talk about all this, because I can´t find anything else to write about except my own life and the human comedy that includes failure. More or less like an influencer does.

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If I were 20 years younger and could choose how to make a living, I would become an influencer. I would start by breaking the windows of the Transmilenio stations, or I would help my mother to escape from jail, because according to Andy Warhol there is no bad advertisement and, definitely in Colombia, the more you act like a criminal, like the people who actually did that of the crystals and helping the mother to escape from jail, the greater the reward. Yes, sir, if I were 20 years younger I would forget this nonsense of literature to concentrate my energies on filming myself playing on the computer so that teenagers watch me pass levels in Minecraft, gamer, is what they call them, and I can make 10,000 dollars in one sitting.

But the truth of all this is that I am not 20 years younger, and things cannot be different than they are. That is why, as Pangloss says in Candide, “Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches”. Something like “If you made your bed, lie in it.” So, the lawyer must make a living talking about law and the writer writes even if he wanted to do something that would make him more money. Or some money in the case of writing that no one pays me to write.

Céline used to say that someone who likes to tell stories that no one has asked for has no shame. Neither does he have one who complains about all the money they don´t pay him to write. A successful influencer gets paid to mention a certain product while tying their shoes on their tiktok account. He can also challenge himself to chew bricks on camera, or she can claim that she is so good in bed that her current boyfriend dumped her ex for it. He and she can do that and endless other nonsense, and still get paid a lot of money. It´s incredible, really it is, but totally true and not for that embarrassing to the extent that a guy writes stories that no one has asked for. And that he complains about it because no one pays her lots of money for it.

Louis Ferdinand Céline was French like Voltaire, but Céline, unlike Voltaire, suffered from a chronic negativism that he did not bother to hide. One of Céline´s phrases from his novel Journey to the End of the Night is: “We are all virgins in pleasure as well as in terror.” Also “When the greats of the world take to loving them, it is because they want to turn them into cannon fodder”. It´s so negative that he becomes funny. I don´t know if it makes sense to be so bad you can turn good, but if you read Céline´s book, you´d know what I´m talking about. In any case, Journey to the End of the Night can be read as a black comedy that exalts human pettiness and stupidity. Everyone is stupid and evil according to Céline, and precisely for this reason no one can surprise the protagonist of the book, who turns out to be Céline himself.

On the other hand, the character of Candide in Voltaire´s book is so I that he passes for an imbecile, and perhaps it is because of this that he experiences countless hardships. However, the comical style of the book makes me think that Voltaire was being nothing but ironic to the point where “Nothing bad can happen in the best of worlds” is the complete opposite of what the book´s protagonist preaches. Certainly, for Voltaire, life was somewhat like his character Candide´s. Voltaire was expelled from France, he was imprisoned, and the censors attacked him many times.

Perhaps it is due in part to the fact that he lived an existence between great failures and many successes, that almost 300 years after its publication, Voltaire´s work is still a source of discussion for a nerd like me who loves to talk to the wind, because only 3 or 4 poor devils read my writings. And yet, just as you can guess Voltaire´s pleasure in writing his little novel, I too enjoy writing very much. I like it so much that from time to time I stand in front of the bathroom mirror and write, looking askance at my reflection to imagine that an audience listens to me with great devotion. I admit that it is somewhat sad and definitely pathetic, but dreaming that I am heard by thousands of people helps me maintain a moderately high optimism when the world outside my window does everything possible to make me lose faith in what I am doing right now, that is, telling stories that no one has asked me to, and giving my opinion about a three-century-old book and its author, who is very little known compared to the influencers, tiktokers, and YouTubers and all those young people with bulging checkbooks who just turn on their cell phones to earn a living comfortably and opulently.

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Certainly, Diana and I do not live comfortably and opulently, but we live quite well. We both work as lawyers in a local mayor´s office in Bogotá and earn enough to live in a nice apartment in a good area of the city. I say all this because I really like my life; at least at my 41 years of age, I like what I am living in this day, time and place in the world. However, according to a longtime friend, I have grown resentful over the years. On a Sunday morning call, after reading one of my writings, my friend told me:

—You are so acid that I don´t feel like to call you.

—I thought you were being funny —I replied surprised.

—I don´t need so much negativism in my life —he replied.

My friend is one of those people who say, "you should surround yourself with people who add to you". He also claims that declaring out loud the things you want in life really makes them happen. I don´t know how true all of this is. I only know that if you want to live in a very good place, you have to cross the city in a 2-hour drive each way to have money in your account. You must also, if you want to win the Nobel Prize for literature one day, write day and night, even if no one reads it, until the time comes when everyone does.

Maybe, if I didn´t complain so much, I´d go from 3 or 4 poor devils who read me to 2,000. I could make $10,000 in one sitting expounding on the power of good intentions, and I´d have my own YouTube channel to talk about all of the things I like to write instead of sitting down to write them. Perhaps, if I used these spaces that ZENU publishing house lends me to write about more positive things, I would attract more public, and my books would sell much better.

That´s a lot of maybes, and there´s certainly an easier way to do things. And more practice. And more successful. And I´m definitely not doing it. That is, "if my aunt had testicles, she would be my uncle." One of my great friends told me this phrase many years ago to illustrate that things are not otherwise because that is life. This does not mean that it is impossible to change the adverse circumstances, and even more so if it is a procedure whose results are not the desired ones.

In this order of ideas (I make use of this connector to conclude the cumbersome administrative resolutions that I have to make in my work), I will allow myself to end this very long writing, with the magnanimous sulfate of optimism, to leave Diana and the cat of the house and to all of you poor devils, with a feeling of hope that will help you deal with the troubles of your day. So here it goes. A bit of optimism from my good friend, deceased three centuries ago, Voltaire: "This is the perfect thing —said Pangloss consoling the crowd after surviving the Lisbon earthquake— because if there is a volcano in Lisbon, it couldn´t be somewhere else; because it is impossible for things to be in a different place than they are; and because everything is fine”.