How does my garden grow?

I think often these days of the famous closing line of Voltaire’s 1759 novella Candide : Il faut cultiver notre jardin . (“We have to cultivate our garden.”) Candide is a satire better known to modern Americans from Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 operetta of the same name. Its protagonist, a naive young optimist, learns through horrific life experience that he can do nothing about war, famine, plague,…