Love and the Reasons Why

  In Voltaire’s satirical novel Candide, the scholar Pangloss professes Earth as the “best of all possible worlds” (2). The statement becomes something of a catchphrase and the center of Pangloss’ philosophy. Candide’s journey, however, reveals a broken and violent world plagued by war and corruption. Candide and his companions meet trouble everywhere they go. Pangloss firmly believes that the world could not possibly be any different, and certainly not any better; he says that everything happens exactly as it is meant to and that changing the course of the world is impossible (12-13). Despite Pangloss’ philosophy, Candide and his valet Cacambo discover a country where war, corruption, and violence seemingly do not exist. Everything that is considered valuable in the rest of the world is mere dust and stone in this hidden country, and its people are perpetually cheerful and welcoming. The city of El Dorado is in many ways a surface parallel to heaven, but beneath that surface par...

  Nothing is ever created for only a single reason. In almost every project or undertaking, the creator or creators have multiple motives. However, most creators also have a single motive that takes precedence over the others. For example, in building a city, one person might build with mainly beauty in mind. Another person might build with functionality as his top priority. A third person might build the city as quickly as he can so that he can start earning income from it. Oftentimes, those goals are most easily achieved when the operation is run by a single person. Occasionally, multiple architects are able to collaborate and create a city just as beautiful as the one that is organized by a single man with a single vision. Most of the time, however, the best cities are created under the thought and direction of one master architect. Cities that are beautiful, functional, and profitable, whether they are designed by one man or many, are almost always created with love and great i...