Humans have long turned to gardens-both real and imaginary-for sanctuary
from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as
far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh's garden of the gods or as
near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks
they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative,
nourishing, necessary havens.
With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful,
wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human
condition. Moving from from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the
gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again
and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and
losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as
both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and
self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an
association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and
Qur'an; Plato's Academy and Epicurus's Garden School; Zen rock and
Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo
Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt-all come into play
as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the
garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power.
Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, Gardens is a
fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison's earlier
classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead. Voltaire famously
urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert
Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility-and its
enduring importance to humanity.
"I find myself completely besotted by a new book titled Gardens: An
Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison. The author . .
. is one of the very best cultural critics at work today. He is a man of
deep learning, immense generosity of spirit, passionate curiosity and
manifold rhetorical gifts."-Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune
"This book is about gardens as a metaphor for the human condition. . . .
Harrison draws freely and with brilliance from 5,000 years of Western
literature and criticism, including works on philosophy and garden
history. . . . He is a careful as well as an inspiring scholar."-Tom
Turner, Times Higher Education
"When I was a student, my Cambridge supervisor said, in the Olympian
tone characteristic of his kind, that the only living literary critics
for whom he would sell his shirt were William Empson and G. Wilson
Knight. Having spent the subsequent 30 years in the febrile world of
academic Lit. Crit. . . . I'm not sure that I'd sell my shirt for any
living critic. But if there had to be one, it would unquestionably be
Robert Pogue Harrison, whose study Forests: The Shadow of
Civilization, published in 1992, has the true quality of literature,
not of criticism-it stays with you, like an amiable ghost, long after
you read it.
"Though more modest in scope, this new book is similarly destined to
become a classic. It has two principal heroes: the ancient philosopher
Epicurus . . . and the wonderfully witty Czech writer Karel Capek,
apropos of whom it is remarked that, whereas most people believe
gardening to be a subset of life, 'gardeners, including Capek,
understand that life is a subset of gardening.'"-Jonathan Bate, The
Spectator