Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

the pyramid’s floors. At the end, after infinite reincarnations, he reaches the apex. And when he reaches the last floor, he has a feeling that is akin to happiness, he thinks he has reached heaven, and then he asks, “Where am I now?” Then they explain that this is Earth. That is, we are in the happiest of all possible worlds. Now, of course, this world is full of misfortune; I think having a toothache is enough to convince us that we don’t live in paradise. But Leibniz explains this by saying it is equivalent to the dark colors in a painting. He invents an illustration of this that is as brilliant as it is false. He tells us to imagine a library with one thousand volumes. Each one of these volumes is the
Aeneid
—or the
Iliad
, if you prefer. (It was believed that the
Aeneid
—or the
Iliad
—was the highest in all of literature.) Now, which would you prefer, a library with one thousand volumes of the
Aeneid
—or the
Iliad
, or any other book that you like a lot, because for this example it doesn’t matter which? Or would you prefer a library with just one copy of the
Aeneid
and works by greatly inferior writers, such as any of our contemporaries? The reader will obviously answer that he would prefer a library with a variety of books. And so Leibniz answers, “Okay, that other library is the world.” In the world we have perfect beings and moments of happiness, as perfect as Virgil. But we have others as bad as the works of Mr. So-and-so, no need to give any names here.
    But this example is false, because a reader can choose from among books, and if it is our lot to choose that horrible work by Mr. What’s-his-name, then who knows if we can be happy.Kierkegaard has a similar example. He says that we can imagine a delicious dish. All the ingredients in that dish are delicious, but for the ingredients in that dish, it’s necessary to add a drop of a bitter aloe, for example. And then he says, “Each of us is one of the ingredients in that dish, but if it is my lot to be the drop of bitter aloe, am I going to be as happy as the one who is a drop of honey?” And Kierkegaard, who had deep religious sentiments, says, “From the depth of Hell, I will be grateful to God for being the drop of bitter aloe that is necessary for the variety and conception of the universe.”Voltaire didn’t think like that; he thought that there is much evil in this world, more evil than good, and so he wrote
Candide
to demonstrate pessimism. One of the first examples he chooses is the earthquake of Lisbon, and he says that God allowed the earthquake of Lisbon to punish the inhabitants for their many sins. Voltaire wonders if the inhabitants of Lisbon are really more sinful than the inhabitants of London or Paris, who have not been judged deserving of an earthquake by divine justice. Now, what could be said against
Candide
and in favor of
Rasselas
is that a world in which
Candide
—which is a delicious work, full of jokes—exists can’t be such a terrible world. Because surely, when Voltaire wrote
Candide
, he didn’t feel the world was so terrible. He was expounding a thesis and was having a lot of fun doing so. On the contrary, in Johnson’s
Rasselas
, we feel Johnson’s melancholy. We feel that for him life is essentially horrible. And the very scantiness of invention in
Rasselas
makes it that much more convincing.
    In the book we will discuss next time, we will seeJohnson’s profound melancholy. We know he felt life as horrible, in a way Voltaire could not have. It is also true that Johnson must have derived a considerable amount of pleasure from the practice of literature, from the ease with which he wrote long, musical sentences, sentences that are never empty, that always mean something. But we know he was a melancholic man. Johnson also lived tormented by his fear of going crazy; he was very conscious of his phobias. . . . I think I mentioned last time that he would commonly attend meetings and recite Our Father out loud. Johnson was much admired in society, but he deliberately retained his country manners. For example, he was at a grand dinner party; and on one side sat a duchess, on the other an academic, and when he ate—above all if the food was a little spoiled, he liked food that was a little spoiled—the veins on his forehead would swell. The duchess said something polite to him, and he answered by brushing her off with his hand and making some kind of grunt. He was a man who, though accepted by