I finally did it! I finally felt educated and well read!!!!

After years of trying to feel intelligent, I finally accomplished something. During a recent trip to Paris, I bought a book Candide, so I could sit outside of a Left Bank café and read philosophy, you know, like they do over there. I bought it at a bookstore called Shakespeare and Co., across the river from Notre Dame. It was a small bookstore, seemingly haphazard in its layout. There was a small curving stairway leading up to rooms where the guidebook said American writers stayed free of charge. There was a piano player in the store. I felt as though I was in a bona fide expatriate hangout. When I bought the book, the clerk asked if I wanted a stamp on the book.
“A stamp?” I asked. “What sort of a stamp?”
How exciting. I imagined Ernest Hemmingway getting some sort of stamp on his own books. I speculated that Benjamin Franklin got a similar stamp validating his membership in the local Mason’s Lodge. How authentic!!!
“A stamp that says ‘Shakespeare and Co.’”, the clerk said. “to show that you got it here.”
I looked at the Penguin-Putnam paperback in my hand and realized I was being had. This was a Disney style set-up designed to make tourists like me feel like we were getting an authentic Paris experience. Later, drinking wine and listening to a Jazz band, I had a similar feeling of authenticity, until I realized I was sitting in a place called the Paris Café. American sucker, I was!
There was in actuality an antique bookstore of the same name located right next door, but that was closed, and that wasn’t where I was. And I suspect antique book collectors opt out of the stamp option.

In reality, this was my third attempt at bringing the correct French philosopher into my awareness. I have been rapidly devouring the novels of Victor Hugo. Les Miserables last year, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame actually inspiring the trip. In my suitcase was the lower profile but no less epic ’93. Victor Hugo’s writing oozes love for his country and city, immersing himself in the emotional extremes of which an individual is capable while exposing the reader to the humanity that spawned the spectrum of history and philosophy spawned by those streets. Climbing the stairs of Notre Dame after reading the famous novel is the sort of deep experience I live for. Exploring a passionate artist’s mind while walking through his inspiration. The height of experience for me is to live the fruits of cumulative investigation. It is a reward for patient exploration of ideas. Ideas built upon each other over time. In this case, it was a mixture of architecture, social religion, spirituality, politics, human nature, and love. Not only Victor Hugo’s point of view, but the people who created the world he describes.
But for some reason, reading 93 didn’t make me feel like the pretentious dirty French artist of my aspirations. 93, like most Victor Hugo novels is too large. It describes the whole society with a totality that transcends most tribal movements. His characters quickly summarize the bubbling cauldron of ideas that the Left Bank was at the time. And to me Hugo gets to the roots of what man’s universal struggle, relegating the politics of movements and labeled affiliations to characters in his larger stories.
It has often been said that all religions preach the same basic truths. But Hugo embodies what those truths may actually be. Light, as a symbol of goodness and knowledge. Freedom as a driving force. He criticizes the earthly politics of the church and other movements while highlighting the nature of the search for truth. I should have realized that putting a stamp on my Voltaire book was actually a bona fide as any other act of pretensions. Ah but irony is another form of literary beauty.

I had burned through a compilation of Jean Paul Satre, but I found him to be a blowhard. I felt like while his approach was essentially a search for truth, it was a basic truth, rather than an expansive truth. It felt like he was writing to create an inarguable niche among professor types, rather than seeking a higher truth. A higher truth is assailable, but not less legitimate. It is more real because it is subject to the whims of other philosophers – like any truths we hold. The truth that a lover of knowledge seeks is strengthened because of how well it holds up despite the weaknesses of our understanding. Whether we mortals can defend a truth has no bearing as to its validity. Our weaknesses are not its.
My reaction to Satre was, “I guess you’re right, but so what?” I felt like his role in philosophy was right, but without meaning, as he concedes meaning to the individual’s interpretation. My interest is in those individuals, not his selfless concessions.

So I bought Candide. From what I could gather, Voltaire is somewhat of a gold standard among philosophers. His statue leads off the Left Bank tour in my Rick Steve’s guidebook. My edition of Candide thankfully has about a dozen footnotes per chapter explaining the irony and sarcasm that define the book.
At first, I thought I would have been lost without the footnotes, because the references were all beyond my knowledge.
Finally, I realized (now, since I put the book down a month ago when I came home and just picked it up again) that I don’t think I’m meant to get this book! I think it’s a brilliant piece of satire for it’s day, but has no more meaning than a Jon Stewart monologue will have next year. I think some of Voltaire’s comments are analogous to, “The people rejected the ruler based on her extensive experience because they could train a fresh college grad for a lower salary”. Because in the present day, whether we can express it or not, we recognize the inconsistency or downright absurdity of some media or political constructs, and are relieved and even excited to hear a succinct and sarcastic rebuttal. But out of context, the target is an absurd thought that never needed an answer.

So, where did I get this misguided feeling of education and well-readedness that I mention in the title to this entry?
I picked up an old issue of the Economist which was lying around my apartment – in fact it was the Feburary 12 issue, which came out right before my trip. It was open to a page about the greater economy. Interestingly, it refers to Jimmy Cayne stepping down as the boss of Bear Sterns, which the magazine pegs as the bank whose failing hedge fund marked the start of the sub-prime credit crisis last June. This, of course was a month before the bank completely failed last week and is currently being bailed, and probably waits to be absorbed by JP Morgan. (This makes the Economist writers well educated and well read, not me, since they have been following this chain of events since mid Feb, while I was busy being upset that I wasn’t enough of an authentic artisy, filthy, liberal, absinthe-drinking, poet, expatriate type because my outdated philosophy book was mass produced).
Anyway, the subheading to this article (or “pre-lead” might be a more accurate way to describe it), read, “Only Panglossians think that the sector is over the worst.”
Aha! Panglossians was a reference to Candide! Pangloss is Candide’s teacher who holds that all is well in the world in spite of all evidence showing otherwise!
This was quite an erudite reference, if I’ve ever heard one, and I got it!

(Not quite as arcane as the South Park episode that was modeled on Ender’s Game, where someone called Cartman a “Fourthy!” but certainly more academic).

And thus, I believe I have made my first step into finally entering the pretentious world which eluded me in Paris. While stamping a book to prove you’ve been in a particular bookstore is indeed pretentious, using a term from a dated French Philosophy book in a modern news article about the economy is completely pretentious. It takes a difficult but important subject matter – the world economy – and instead of clarifying it for the average educated reader, makes it more difficult to understand by those who might have been occupied by things other than philosophy or French literature while in college.

By the way, I mentioned earlier, irony contains its own beauty. The name Pangloss is a derivative of two words: Pan, which means “all”, and gloss, which means “talk.” Which is a good way to describe any article that prognosticates about the economy as much as this did (and indeed many Economist articles do). There are a few paragraphs about how JP Morgan may be the next to be hit, and JP Morgan in fact the bank who profited this week from Bear Sterns’ loss. All talk indeed.