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 , 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