Word: leibnitz
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...When she first met Jean-Paul Sartre, he was a fellow student at the Sorbonne. "Except when he's asleep. Sartre thinks all the time!" a friend told Simone. Petrified, she entered Sartre's lair for a day-long talkathon on her metaphysical treatise. The Concept in Leibnitz. Simone confided to her diary, "He's a marvelous trainer of intellects." Before long, they were playing pinball machines together, going to un-adult westerns, and scaling the roofs over the student dens, with the great intellect-trainer booming out Ol' Man River in a beery baritone. Here...
...that "the only book in that language was frivolous," i.e., Don Quixote. Her scientific and mathematical knowledge surpassed Voltaire's. Together, they were destined to change intellectual history, Voltaire by championing Newton in France, Emilie by helping to open the border to the philosophy of Germany's Leibnitz. Voltaire was high-strung, always ailing, always in hot water with the authorities; Emilie was "strong as an ox" and influential at court: the powerful Due de Richelieu had been her lover. She and Voltaire wrote to each other nearly every day, even when they were in the same house...
...Candide. Voltaire used the Lisbon affair to demolish the fashionable interpretation of the Leibnitz philosophy by which every happening was necessary and therefore good. Candide and Dr. Pangloss had a terrible time in the earthquake, despite their good characters; only a "brutal sailor" did well out of the disaster, happy in the ruins with loot, wine and women. Thus Voltaire derided the notion that those who have bad luck must deserve it. Some men as sensible as Voltaire, and more charitable, recalled what Jesus said on the occasion of a mishap in the Holy Land: "Those eighteen, upon whom...