Cultivate Your Garden

Chapter thirty of Voltaire's Candide, and the survivors are settled on a small farm outside Constantinople, where boats pass all day carrying men into exile and other men in to replace them. Salman Rushdie reads an ending that spends thirty chapters arguing and then recommends you stop. Then the book turns its last question on whoever is holding it, and Rushdie declines to answer in the abstract. He answers out of his own life: the writers tyrants come for, the years when hope was hard to find, a wall in Berlin. Engage with the world, or tend what is yours?