1. Under what conditions is buttering my bagel an artistic act?
2. As you read the essay on French theory, don't get bogged down in all the names. What I want you to understand is the author's description of the Enlightenment period and the problems that arose as a result of the movement toward rationalism and away from the faith-based arguments of the church. There are direct applications here to Voltaire, but also to all of the rest of the readings. The readings in the packet could not be possible without the Enlightenment and the problems/solutions that it proposed.
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8 comments:
I suppose buttering your bagel is artistic if you claim to have conjured up an image of some saint or another and proceed to auction it off to religious fanatics on ebay. Do you think I could pay off some of my credit card bills by doing this?
What about the guy who said he needed a million dollars to live...cause God told him in a dream...
He did get well over a million dollars...
Rebecca had said that buttering your bagel could be artistic, and I would agree that it can have an element of art, IF it is done with serious attention and mindfulness, which I think is necessary for art. In other words, NOT the way we would normally do it.
there's an art to buttering ones bagel, how you apply the butter or cream cheese, if you make it look pretty or messy... those people that make food look nice and presentable for tv or magazines and cookbooks do that for a living- artistic directors or something, that's their form of art and lively hood.
im reading up more on the enlightenment and voltaire, but in candide, he and all his "friends", maybe aside from the Baron a bit were all philosophers and didnt seem very religious at all. they were almost like a group of enlightened people that naturally ended up flocking together because their views on their current worlds were similar. with the inquistion taking place and candide and pangloss in the thick of it, we see how not only corrupt and hypocritical the catholic chruch was then.. the need to assert their power was all over europe and spilling into the americas.. but people dont like to have ideas and beliefs pushed on them, and the catholic church just took it to such an extreme level for years to prove points, but really all they were doing was sinning and ruining so many lives which really goes against so much of their teachings.
i think they were not ready to let go of their strong beliefs or morals and turned out to be these crazed people on a "mission" or they claimed it was a "mission from god" to rid the world of withces, non christians and others.
the world changes everyday, people discover new things every moment of everyday... it can take a life time also... just like in candide, not till the end did they all kind of "get it" and see things in new ways. for so long they just kept on going, and searching for things all over.. but really its simplicity.. family, love etc...
I find the end of the bagel - I mean of Candide - to be particularly interesting. What is the resolution? Is the solution to lead a simple life, gardening, not questioning? This would seem counter to the Englightenment impulse to always improve oneself through the use of our minds. I think there is more here. How does one lead a moral life AND remain engaged in the world. Candide's solution seems to be to hide away.
Candide angered me when he wanted to leave Cunnegode (if that is the correct spelling) because she became ugly. But then he won me back when he married her anyway, even if it was a wee begrudgingly.
okay on a more serious note, i kind of liked the fact that Candide ends on a more pessimistic note. The characters rather ditch the idea of a perfect world. Good for them, because a perfect world doesn't exist! We need to bitter to make the sweet so sweet (even though their bitter seemed to involve a lot of raping and pillaging, i guess it made the good times just that much better. yikes.)
I think the end is pessimistic as well, though I can't imagine a different ending.
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