What most delights us today in Candide is not the 'conte philosophique', nor its satire, nor the gradual emergence of a morality and vision of the world: instead it is its rhythm. With rapidity and lightness, a succession of mishaps, punishments and massacres races over the page, leaps from chapter to chapter, and ramifies and multiplies without evoking in the reader's emotions anything other than a feeling of an exhilarating and primitive vitality.

Certainly the philosopher was not a pessimistic luncheon companion. He […] loped off in the direction of the London Library, leaving me with an impression of twinkling eyes, laughter lines (he whinnies like a donnish Houyhnhnm), and a sensibility genuinely focused on what will happen in the next five minutes - or five years - albeit one steeped in knowledge of the past.

“Okay,” I say. “I get it. I'm king douchelord and you trust me but you don't. You don't know me well enough to know how deep the douchery goes.”

The attribution is probably wrong, said Thomas, but the tradition of his being a painter was interesting if we considered the specially artistic character of the 3rd gospel, as against the purely facty nature of the other two synoptics, or the mystical nature of the 4th.