Thoughts on a Midnight Day

This morning I was woken up early by a bright ray of sunshine seeping through the window to caress my sleeping face. I propped myself up onto my elbows and glanced up at the pure, diluted blue skies, and felt the cool breeze wrap itself around me, waking me up fully at once.

Uncertainty... the basis of life? Perhaps it is, and it is why human ingenuity always strives so much to make things as certain as they can be.

Listening to the crows' rasped cries outside... it reminds me of how all the other birds never fail to stay at a distance from them and seeing that makes it too easy to assume that the bird is some sort of black angel of death that shouldn't be approached.

Alone they sit on the grass, oblivious to all the other birds keeping away from them. As they hop along, the others hop back further from them... I once sat on the grass for a very long time merely observing such a scene. That day was the first time I felt sorry for the crow. I wished to have been able to speak its language even for a moment.

"Why are you so sad, Mr Crow?"

"I am not sad, child. You only perceive me as such."

"It is because I see all the other birds avoiding you so much, which leads me to feel sad for you."

"And so it is that what you feel you reflect back on me. How flawed of you, dear."

"Flawed?"

"Yes, dear. Look at these birds standing away from me - what do you see?"

"I see... I see their fear. They stand uneasy at a distance from you as though in the presence of some dark, threatening omen."

"Yes. Most are afraid of me. Some know better than to bother me. My beak seeks mostly the fallen rotting flesh on the ground, but it is strong enough to break a sparrow's neck."

"But you are always so alone, Mr Crow..."

"Solitude is nothing more than refined taste, my dear."

"I don't understand what you mean..."

"Sure you do. You understand. I ask you what you see in the other birds, and you replied "fear". Why should my alienation from them make my solitude in any way bitter?"

"But surely at times you must wish for some to show less fear of you... for some to hop closer to you and see past the fear you evoke in them?..."

"It isn't so, my child. If it were, nature would have made of me a singing sparrow that charms the human heart so easily. Instead, it gave me the dark plummage of shadows and a rasped voice that sends shivers down your spine whenever it echoes in the air."

"That seems quite unfair and uncompromising."

"Fairness is a concept invented by unlucky people - you thought it yourself, did you not?"

"I guess I did... There is no such thing as fairness, is there? Only an intricate symphony of interconnections between all that there is; all that existed, exists and will come to be."

"So it should be that I stand alone while the sparrow charms the crowd. It comes fluttering by your window in the morning, its soft, endearing song filling your heart with quiet joy, until my shadow looms closer from the sky and my rasped call reminds you of how fleeting everything in life is. From joy your heart leaps to worry, fear, perhaps even sadness, but without the sparrow and I, you would have felt nothing."

This morning Voltaire came to mind and I wasn't sure why. The reason he came to mind was because I started dwelling on the meaning of illegitimacy in literature (out of wedlock or bastard children as protagonists) and that reminded me of what an old teacher in literature class had once said - that often in literature, a character who happened to be an illegitimate child was a symbol that the character would have to go through a long and difficult journey of self-discovery leading to greater fulfilment. I never forgot that side comment because it instantly made me identify to such characters.
The teacher had said that while we were analysing a text from Voltaire - and that’s from that vague memory that I felt the need to look it up… However I had no recollection of the book‘s title, but googling “Voltaire and illegitimacy” did the trick.

The novella’s title was Candide.

I was struck by the fact that I barely remembered ever having read it, yet as soon as I refreshed my memory on the main themes, it all came flooding back to me. The reason I had seemingly forgotten all about it might be down to the fact that I was 16 when we studied that novella in class, but perhaps it was also due to the very flawed way in which schools link learning so much with testing, so that in effect, we cram everything into our head not so much with a desire to understand for ourselves what it is we’re learning by heart, but to get the ‘best’ result on a piece of paper.

Anyway… Candide happens to be a strong critique of Leibniz’s Optimism theory, which basically concludes that we live in the best of possible worlds. More precisely, Leibniz's line of thought rests on the idea that our universe is the best possible one that could have been created by God (assumed as an infallible entity or being). In Candide, Voltaire makes a scathing attack of such theory or argument, literally tearing it to pieces with all the might of his renowned sarcastic streak. The protagonist (named Candide) starts off educated by an old man (Pangloss)who symbolises Leibniz's optimism, and the premice of the satire gives plenty of room to denounce the reasoning flaws in the theory through the words of the old man. The latter's mantra? "All is for the best" (because... this is the best of possible words we live in based on the assumption that God, who is all powerful and perfect, created it, therefore it must be the best of worlds created etc)... Voltaire attacks the reasoning and in effect ridicules it through Pangloss whose logic is shown as flawed in the way he would explain things to his pupil Candide. Like... mixing up cause and effect, among other things:


"It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles", would say Pangloss.


What is also denounced is the far too easy way in which that optimism theory handles the realities of the world, such as suffering, pain, diseases, natural disasters. Instead of going in depth as to the possible meaning of such occurrences in the world, the theory conveniantly bundles them all up under the same 'roof' that allows for no further questioning - God. And that's the end of it, no need apparently to seek to understand beyond that.

As the story unfolds, Candide leaves the old man to discover the world and it is through his travels that he is faced with the realities of the world, which put the old man's optimism to the test every time.

As I refreshed my memory on the story itself, I had to check for myself what that optimism theory was all about, of course. So I looked up what Leibniz's works were all about. I discovered that beside that theory, Leibniz also happened to be part of the rationalist school of thought but what I really found interesting was his 'obsession' or belief that thoughts could somehow be translated or reduced to a form of calculation of some sort...

Another thing that happens to fascinate me, really, is how we come across things in life (reading, learning something at some point or even going through a certain experience) that may seem irrelevant or easy to dismiss at the time and yet years later these very things we came across briefly will come back to mind for no obvious reason known to the conscious side of the mind... but as it comes back to mind, suddenly you realise that it is only now that you can truly make sense of such things you read or learned all that while back. In a way, it feels like we spend our life collecting what appears to be random pieces of a jigsaw that we can't complete or make sense of because we have no idea how the pieces are supposed to fit together - but the mind (the awakened mind, that is -- that can think in depth for itself) is powerful enough to make them fit together seamlessly when the time is right in terms of a person's own growth in understanding and reasoning.