The Communist Manifesto vs Voltaire

I had been reading the Communist Manifesto earlier today to kill time before leaving to visit relatives for Thanksgiving. My advice on attempting to pass the time with such revolutionary literature: don't. I hadn't read the Communist Manifesto before (though I've had a wonderful book, a collection of revolutionary literature, sitting on my desk begging to be read for the past few months), but it's heavy, heavy stuff. Not many works of literature ever send me to the cabinet for Aspirin, but by the second half of the Manifesto I was both taking extensive notes and drugged up on ibuprofen.

Not to actually dissuade anyone from reading the Communist Manifesto, because it's a wonderful piece of literature and makes quite a lot of sense, but it is not the sort of thing to simply kill time with. If I were a bit less lazy than I actually am, I would take each heading from my notes and write a lengthy commentary for myself to follow the argument and the dizzying amount of connections and leaps from one step to the next.

There was a wonderful quote that I thought of regarding the kind of sustained thinking needed to read something like the Communist Manifesto (every sentence bombards the mind with something new--reading even a paragraph is like having several bullets of ideas and arguments shot into your head). I thought the quote was by Voltaire, so I picked up his Letters on England and thumbed through it for underlined or highlighted sections (I admit I didn't highlight all the important passages on my own--the great thing about buying from used bookstores near a university is that all the relevant passages have already been noted by the student who previously owned it).

It occurred to me, flipping through Letters, that Voltaire was the sort of writer one could kill time with. All the letters that I thought should contain the quote actually didn't, but I passed a lot of time having to stop and read it from the beginning because it was so relaxing. Reading Voltaire after the Communist Manifesto, I could feel a literal rush of tension leave my forehead in a way that painkillers could never accomplish. An intellectual vomit, I suppose. The way I like to think of it is that the Communist Manifesto is like a harsh attack of vital information and idea with every syllable; Voltaire's work is certainly of equal importance, but the writing is much... softer, in a sense. To steal imagery from a review of Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner), reading Voltaire is like walking with him through a garden on a sunny day while he explains his ideas in a humorous, charismatic fashion. (At least, that happens to be so with Letters on England and often the Philosophical Dictionary; I can't say that Candide had the same charm.)

Though I still haven't found the quote, I managed to accomplish one thing today: my time is dead and gone. In fact, I'm quite sure that I'm late. Such is life.

"Someday."

Ever have one of those persistant-yet-passive thoughts? Think, "I should write a novel someday," after you read a nice book? Wonder why the sky is blue, then fail to follow through with your curiosity? Contemplate starting a personal project, think of it in passing every so often, but never actually complete it?

I've experienced all of the above, but the one that currently holds my attention is the last one. There is a list (rather, there would be a list, if I got around to making one) of creative projects I've been looking to take on--some for a rather long time, and some that have been plaguing me since I was a very small child. But where I'm actually going with this is that for the last month or so, I'd been thinking that I ought to have a 'serious' blog. This was prompted by several things at once: a desire to seem more professional in my art (musing on paper), my growing adoration for essayists, and the fact that I would never let the URL of my personal blog anywhere near people who take me seriously.

So, this is my attempt at a 'serious' blog, one that I dearly hope I will never be ashamed to hand out the URL to. It's a pseudo-companion to my as-yet-uncompleted online writing portfolio, Wandering Ink, but you don't have to bother with it unless polished fiction and the occasional essay is your thing. And even then, I don't believe I take editing as seriously as I should.

Concluding a first post with a pair of quotes may be a bit tacky, but I have far too many of them at my disposal.

"The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was a part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. ... The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already."

George Orwell, '1984'

"Divide mankind into twenty parts: nineteen consist of men who work with their hands and will never know that there is a Locke in the world, and in the remaining twentieth part how few men you will find who are readers! And of those who read, twenty read novels to one who studies philosophy. The number of those who think is exceedingly small, and they are not interested in upsetting the world."

Voltaire, 'Philosophical Letters'