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SGANARELLE
803

accumulated and frightened power of every institution and will have to fight against it. Even he, I fear, will have little faith in the state, and happier by far will be the man who has none. For to him will be restored the spectacle of life without the framework of society; he will be forced to perpetual concessions and compromises in his own circumstances, but he will make them without hurt because they will question no principle of his. He will let the state go hang, not at all sure that civilization is destined to go with it, but rather bleakly taking his chance. He will give up, and if he is a superior individual the sacrifice will not be light, the pretension to great power. He will have the consolation of knowing that Beauty abides with him. For he will understand that the political life of man has become in a sense the enemy of the creative life of the mind. He will understand, I think, what Voltaire meant in the most cynical precept of Candide, that we must cultivate our garden.

Sganarelle