> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.rebindclassics.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Those Who Walk Away from Eldorado - URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/those-who-walk-away-from-eldorado/ - Published: 2026-07-28T22:09:19.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-02T18:27:22.000Z - Description: Why does Candide leave the perfect city? John Kaag on Voltaire, Rushdie, and the gold that is worthless until you carry it out. - Author: John Kaag - Tags: Salman Rushdie on Voltaire's Candide, #introduction Last spring I sat with Salman Rushdie in the library of the Players Club on Gramercy Park (the old actors’ club where Edwin Booth once lived, where the walls hold portraits of people who spent their lives pretending to be someone else), and we talked about a city made of gold. We were there to shoot the films that would become the centerpiece of [his Rebind conversation on *Candide*](https://www.rebindclassics.com/tag/candide/), and between setups he kept returning to the same question: [why does Candide leave Eldorado](https://www.rebindclassics.com/what-is-candide-about/)? Not as a plot question. As a philosophical one. Why does anyone walk away from the place where all is well? I didn’t have a good answer then. I’ve been working on one since. There is a moment in *Candide* when Voltaire lets his battered hero rest. After shipwrecks, floggings, earthquakes, inquisitions, and the casual murder of everyone he loves (or thinks he loves), Candide floats down a river that grows increasingly improbable until it disappears underground entirely. When it surfaces again, he has arrived somewhere impossible. The streets are paved with rubies. Children play with emeralds in the dust. The inn is free and the food is extraordinary, and the innkeeper cannot understand why anyone would want to pay. Voltaire, who spent the better part of thirty chapters cataloguing human catastrophe with the velocity of a fever dream, slows down. He lets Candide stay. What Voltaire does not explain, and what Rushdie kept pressing on in that library, is the source of the city’s wealth. “What El Dorado is built on,” Rushdie said, “Voltaire doesn’t tell us.” The gems are simply there, underfoot, everywhere, valuable to no one inside the walls because value requires scarcity and scarcity requires someone to go without. In Eldorado, no one goes without. Gold is a pebble. A ruby is something children leave in the street. What Voltaire does explain is what the city lacks. No prisons. No courts. No clergy enforcing orthodoxy at knifepoint. No compulsory worship. A king who seems simply a representative of everyone’s shared good sense. Eldorado, Rushdie pointed out, “is defined by what it isn’t — everything the rest of the world is not.” It is a utopia assembled entirely from absences. For thirty chapters of catastrophe, the absences are exactly right. And then Candide leaves. This is not stupidity, or not only stupidity, though Candide is reliably stupid. It is something stranger: a confession that the perfect world is uninhabitable. Not because it lacks anything material, but because it lacks the one thing abundance cannot provide. Cunegonde is in Buenos Aires. Eldorado, however flawless, cannot be home without her. But there is a second reason the city cannot hold him, one Rushdie noticed with characteristic precision. To let Candide and Cacambo leave, the king must build a machine, a contraption to hoist them up and over the mountains that seal the city from the world. The moment that machine exists, something shifts. > *“Once leaving becomes possible, El Dorado itself is questioned. Are Candide and Cacambo really the only ones who would want to use it? It’s one thing to be told it’s impossible to leave, but once it’s possible and you’re still not allowed to, that’s not freedom. In a way, El Dorado is destabilized — not by external threat, but by the mechanism of escape.”* The perfect city contains, from the moment its exit is constructed, the seed of its own undoing. Building the way out is the first crack in the ideal. Voltaire understood that utopia is always elsewhere. Thomas More put his ideal society on an island and named it *Utopia*, a Greek pun meaning both “good place” and “no place.” Voltaire puts his in the unmappable interior of South America, behind mountains, at the end of an underground river, reachable only by accident. The unreachability is the point. We need Eldorado to exist so that we can want to leave it. Ursula K. Le Guin understood the same logic. Her story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” describes a city of perfect happiness sustained by a single, hidden cruelty — one child kept in darkness so that everyone else can flourish. Some citizens, upon learning the truth, simply walk away. They cannot stay in the perfect city once they know what it costs. Le Guin never tells us where they go. Voltaire’s move is different but rhymes with hers: Candide’s Eldorado costs nothing visible, harms no one, and he walks away from it anyway. The mystery is not moral but existential. The perfect city is not enough. It has never been enough. What Candide takes with him when he goes is more interesting than what he leaves behind. He loads up the sheep with gold and gems, the pebbles no one in Eldorado would have bothered to pick up. In the real world, this is a fortune. In the real world, he is immediately robbed of most of it. He tells everyone about Eldorado. He shows off. He is stripped bare — again and again, across the remaining chapters, by ship captains, con men, and grifters. Yet the fortune somehow lasts to the end. Rushdie found something quietly moving in this: “The gold gives him power, but it doesn’t affect his nature. That shows us something very likable about him.” Candide is stripped of Eldorado’s gold but not of Eldorado’s innocence. He remains, improbably, the man that city briefly made him feel he could be. “You want to protect him,” Rushdie said, leaning forward in one of the old leather chairs, “while all these people are robbing him blind.” Later in the novel, Voltaire introduces [a figure who is Candide’s dark twin](https://www.rebindclassics.com/candide-characters-guide/): [Senator Pococurante of Venice](https://www.rebindclassics.com/power-disappoints/), a man of enormous wealth and total dissatisfaction. Where Eldorado had abundance and joy, Pococurante has abundance and contempt. He is surrounded by Raphaels he finds tedious, Homers he cannot finish, music that bores him, women who no longer interest him. > *“In El Dorado, there’s immense wealth and comfort, and everyone finds joy in it. Here, we meet a man who has everything but values nothing. Voltaire illustrates the jaded palate, showing how having everything can be as detrimental to the soul as having nothing. Enormous affluence can bring happiness if viewed one way — and misery if viewed another.”* Pococurante is the answer to the question Eldorado leaves open. The city showed us wealth without exploitation, plenty without scarcity, gold without desire. Pococurante shows us what happens when a man has all of that in the real world and has had it long enough to find it meaningless. He is what the escaped man finds when the escape is complete and there is nothing left to escape toward. I think about this in 2026, in what may be the richest moment in human history by any quantitative measure, and also one of the more anxious. The paradox is not new, but it has sharpened. The wealthiest people in the world spend considerable energy and treasure on escape — from cities, from countries, from the planet itself. They are loading up the sheep with Eldorado’s gold and carrying it into a world that will find uses for it that Eldorado never imagined. The abundance of Eldorado cannot be exported. Its logic does not travel. The gold that is worthless on streets of gold is infinitely desirable on streets of mud, and its desirability is precisely what makes it dangerous. Candide learns this. We keep relearning it. At the end of *Candide*, [the hero famously cultivates his garden](https://www.rebindclassics.com/cultivate-your-garden-candide-meaning/). It is Voltaire’s most celebrated image and his most deliberately small one. After everything ([the grand philosophy](https://www.rebindclassics.com/philosophy-behind-candide-optimism/), the global wreckage, the golden city), the answer is to tend a small plot of earth, to do the work in front of you, to stop asking the world to mean something it does not mean. The garden is not Eldorado. It is deliberately not Eldorado. It is muddy and finite and it requires labor. Rushdie read this not as resignation but as instruction. “Cultivating your garden isn’t a passive act,” he said, in the Players Club library with the portraits looking on. “It’s a way of making the next thing grow.” The city of gold stays behind the mountains. The garden is what you can reach. We imagine the place where all is well. We leave it when we find it. We carry its gold into a world that will take it from us. And then, if we are lucky, we find a garden, and we begin.