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.