Ô malheureux mortels ! Ô terre déplorable !
Voltaire wrote Candide from the shock of hearing about Lisbon's earthquake. This emotion was probably fueled by his rivarly with Rousseau on the question of Christianity. Voltaire's grief was, really, religion.
There are, however, calamities of an altogether different caliber: those that are not to be blamed on an external agent—be it the chaotic fate of the random forces of nature or the senseless or inscrutable motive of a divinity—but those that are to be blamed on ourselves, on what is at the root of the human being. Another event of this type, the Seven Years' war, contemporary with the earthquake, inspired Voltaire this great truth:
- Presque toute l’histoire est une suite d’atrocités inutiles. (en)
I started with this recollection of Voltaire to distribute the horrible in a balance in which we hold some scales. A natural catastrophe would never, I think, affects me in the way it did revolt this most prestigious of names. I feel all the strength and optimism of Rousseau against catastrophes of this type, that are bad luck which our better judgments and abilities will one day keep under control. I feel, however, the same bitter disappointment, profound disgust and utter revulsion at existence when it comes to catastrophes that are inflicted by a rational and sadistic evil, that we might be—that we seemingly will remain—forever unable to tame. Not the evil from Voltaire's deity, whom he was mocking in his poem on Lisbon disaster:
- Aux cris demi-formés de leurs voix expirantes,
- Au spectacle effrayant de leurs cendres fumantes,
- Direz-vous : « C'est l'effet des éternelles lois
- Qui d'un Dieu libre et bon nécessitent le choix » ?
But that from our own evil. That from, for instance, whoever in whatever "administration" is responsible for such an image:
This is just a picture, we don't even see all of it, let alone most of it, not even much of it. It is slightly more than the sort of feedback Voltaire might have had when hearing about the earthquake.
I can't stop looking at it, the representation of the sheer, absolute, maddening, eternal truth that we, as human beings, are a bunch of criminals, hypocrites and heartless, selfish beasts who don't really care about anything but our own little business, be that food, sex, money, fame and glory or some variation but surely not one that goes much farther than that. I'm looking at it from the comfort of a sunny Spanish Sunday and I can't even start to explore what it has to say about me and the rest of us.
This particular photo also puts an image on the most excruciating poem I know, Le dormeur du val from Rimbaud:
- Un soldat jeune, bouche ouverte, tête nue,
- Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu,
- Dort ; il est étendu dans l'herbe, sous la nue,
- Pâle dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut.
The text, infinitely more beautiful, deep and true than all that Voltaire has ever written, describes the peace of a young man, a soldier, innocently sleeping in the grass. Only at the last line, does it reveal that the soldier is dead.