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Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition
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.
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.
262 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
43 people are currently reading
621 people want to read
About the author
Robert Pogue Harrison
15 books41 followersRobert Pogue Harrison is a critic, radio host, and the Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature at Stanford University. His most recent book is Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
June 13, 2011
It would be hard to imagine anybody less interested in gardens than I am, so the effect this book had on me was quite a surprise. I recently saw a review of a new Dante translation in the NY Review of Books, a review written by Harrison, that was so incisive and clearly written that I decided to look up one of his own books. He holds the chair in Italian literature at Stanford, and I expected this to be pretty much a lit-crit summary of the meaning of gardens in western literature. It slides that way in the middle, but mostly it lives up to its fairly portentous subtitle. The theme is that humans are fundamentally cultivators, and if they don't have something to care for, to be concerned about, they are not quite human. He opens his argument with (for me) a fresh look at the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve were merely consumers--everything was provided, they literally did not have a care in the world. When offered the forbidden fruit, Eve didn't have a soul-searching moment, or consciously rebel against God, or hesitate. She just said, "OK." And Adam did the same. Harrison's word is "insouciance." No more idea of consequences than a two-year-old playing with a loaded gun. Thrown out of paradise, they are forced to become cultivators, care-givers, and only then do they become fully human. He contrasts the myth of Adam and Eve with a different one (unfamiliar to me) from the fables of Hyginus, in which the goddess Cura (Care) is the founding mother of all humanity. Harrison then goes on to consider virtually every aspect of gardens--from Zen rock gardens in Japan to the "back to Eden" paradise for the blessed promised by Islam. He points out that the earthly paradise Dante finds at the top of Mount Purgatory is boring even for him, and another whole book of the Divine Comedy is required to present the true Paradiso, which is a much more active, lively place/experience. A fascinating book full of fresh (for me) insights. I look forward to his other two books, Forests and Dominions of the Dead.
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January 12, 2021I fuckin' hate gardens. I hated every time I was dragged to a garden on a family vacation, almost as much as I hated weeding.
And this was recommended to me over a decade ago by a girl I knew in college who had been raised in a Quaker colony, and therefore was especially susceptible to trolling by me and my jaded friends. I suspected I'd like Robert Pogue Harrison, but I wasn't quite ready.
Now, I won't say Robert Pogue Harrison has won me over, but I see the point. This is a detailed history of the concept of the garden, told in rich detail with a delightfully intellectual voice of the professor-lecturing-under-a-tree sort. Whether his conclusions are accurate, I'm not entirely sure, and they frankly seem a little too hippy-dippy for me. But the story is well told.
And this was recommended to me over a decade ago by a girl I knew in college who had been raised in a Quaker colony, and therefore was especially susceptible to trolling by me and my jaded friends. I suspected I'd like Robert Pogue Harrison, but I wasn't quite ready.
Now, I won't say Robert Pogue Harrison has won me over, but I see the point. This is a detailed history of the concept of the garden, told in rich detail with a delightfully intellectual voice of the professor-lecturing-under-a-tree sort. Whether his conclusions are accurate, I'm not entirely sure, and they frankly seem a little too hippy-dippy for me. But the story is well told.
January 5, 2024
These essays are thoughtful and rich. I particularly liked Essay 6: "Academos" about Plato's ideal of education as cultivation, Essay #13, "The Paradise Divide: Islam and Christianity" that compares Islamic and Christian understandings of paradise and makes a really provocative point about the restlessness within Christianity that doesn't accept a tranquil paradise but is ever seeking a "dynamic, intoxicating process of self-surpassing" (144-145). Harrison's critique of the modern, western, drive to consume and destroy in Essay 15: "The Paradox of the Age" was also interesting.
December 5, 2018
Beautifully written. References to some of my favorite stories such as Voltaire's 'Candide' and Sartre's 'Nausea'. The language was easily understood and not superfluous or tedious as some philosophical essays can be. The author uses a ton of references from books I have promptly added to my "To Read" list. The paradoxes presented in this essay really spoke to my interests and I can't wait to read more from the author.
April 26, 2020
The cover of “Gardens” displays an image of Kingscote Gardens in the grounds of Stanford University where Prof. Harrison teaches. This picture indicates that some of the book will focus on physical gardens. But the scope of “Gardens” is much wider than that. Indeed, in the preface, by quoting the famous last sentence from Voltaire’s “Candide” (il faut cultiver notre jardin), he prepares the perceptive reader for something more. But no preparation could give readers even a hint of the ride they are about to experience.
This review is fairly long, but I want to allay any fears that it might be a spoiler. In this book, Harrison has presented an account that is complex, ramified, and elegant and I doubt that anything I write could do more than hint weakly at what he has accomplished. Delight will come to the reader from the details.
Gardens that are or might be considered physical occupy the first five chapters of the book: The Vocation of Care, Eve, The Human Gardner, Homeless Gardens, and Mon jardin à moi. Things then move on from there. But let me start at the top.
Harrison dedicates his book “To Eve and her daughters”, priming us for a discussion of the Garden of Eden. We do get that, but jumping from the dedication page, over the Preface and Acknowledgments, we move immediately into something quite different. Because there is another creation myth that explains the end result of the Eden story, but does so through a quite different route. That account begins at the Roman goddess Cura.
According to that account, it was Cura who formed homo sapiens from clay, and had Jupiter breathe life, spirit, into that clay. But the constellation of deities was roiling in jealousies, jockeying for advantage, and frequently engaged in argument and negotiation. An arrangement was worked out, under which homo sapiens was Cura’s charge. But this was just a temporary thing, since part of the agreement was that homo also would be mortal, and Cura enjoyed her privilege only as long as homo lived.
Harrison uses these two accounts, the Eden story and the Cura story, as the basis for a discussion that extends very fruitfully throughout the book. In the Eden story, Adam and Eve were not mortal, and they lived in a garden where they were entirely at ease. There was nothing they needed to do. It was Eve who convinced Adam to taste the forbidden fruit, something that caused them to be evicted from Eden, their immortal status to come to an end, and their new surroundings weighing them down with cares. But by rejecting immortality and accepting death, Eve accepted the responsibilities that come with a limited life span.
Through Cura, Harrison embarks on an invigorating discussion of ‘care’, and what a ‘garden’ really means. Care can mean a worry, or a burden, but it can also mean the act of looking after something. That something can be a garden, but ‘garden’ is also allegorical, and with this in mind, the wider meaning for Voltaire’s statement, il faut cultiver notre jardin, becomes evident immediately.
Harrison’s first five chapters speak of gardens and gardeners in a literal sense, every chapter being a delight of text that weaves together myth, literature, and some practical stuff of life. But beginning at Chapter 6, the wheels really leave the runway.
While harking back to Stanford’s Kingscote Garden (covered in Chapter 5 as “Mon jardin à moi”), Harrison moves the discussion to a broader context in Chapters 6 (Academos), 7 (The Garden School of Epicurus), and 8 (Boccaccio’s Garden Stories). I won’t relate any detail here, apart from saying that Academos refers to Plato’s Academy, the Garden School of Epicurus provides sharply relevant insights into an extraordinary philosopher, and Boccaccio’s Garden Stories takes a side trip into Boccaccio’s masterwork, The Decameron.
In Chapter 9 and onwards, we move through the centuries, and the shadows of our modern world begin to appear. Chapter 9 (Monastic, Republican, and Princely Gardens) talks of gardens that are becoming closed and are enclosed or exclusive places. Where previously a garden was an accessible spot embedded in a wider world but made special by the care lavished upon it by its gardener, now gardens become places of privilege. This change reaches its extreme, for Harrison, in the Sun King’s garden of Chapter 10, A Note on Versailles. At Versailles, nature, as a place where diversity and randomness operate, is suppressed and obliterated, and in its place is constructed a garden of severely imposed form, a monument to human pride, arrogance and caprice. Nature becomes a permanently indentured slave.
Chapters 11, 12, and 14 take the story much further, drifting deeper into the murk of our modern world. In Chapters 11 (The Lost Art of Seeing) and 12 (Sympathetic Miracles), Harrison writes of the lost ability of people even to detect the presence of a garden (either physical or metaphorical) and to see and appreciate what it contains and represents. Chapter 13 (The Paradise Divide: Islam and Christianity) was the only chapter in the book that seemed to me out of place. In Chapter 14 (Men Not Destroyers), we hit rock bottom. Rather than comment, I will cite some of Harrison’s text from this chapter.
On page 149:
“Here I propose to look more directly, call it more diagnostically, at this modern spiritual condition and to emphasise its pathology rather than its freedom seeking energies. Certainly one could say that our congenital Western restlessness is both the consequence and the cause of the loss of those basic structures that once used to direct and regulate the course of human action.”
And further along:
“As the defining spiritual condition of our late and perhaps even terminal modernity, the restlessness in question could be characterized as a whirlwind wherein those of us who are swept up in its turbulence are at once driven and aimless. This is a paradoxical condition, to be sure. To be both driven and aimless means that the impulses that set us into motion may have proximate goals but no ultimate aim, unless the perpetuation of aimless motion can be considered an aim in itself.”
Then finally:
“The reader who has made it this far in this book will have noticed that, in general, I tend to favour revelation over demonstration, embodied figures over analytical concepts, and the discernment of poets over the disquisitions of philosophers. That is why this is a book about gardens and not a book about the ethics of care. That is also why, when it comes to the present chapter, I feel that the first order of business is to seek out an emblem, or revelatory figure, for the aimless drivenness of our age. It so happens that I find such an emblem in what some people might consider an unlikely place: in the dusty archives of a by now antiquated – or apparently antiquated – literature.”
Harrison’s emblem is Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso. The remainder of the chapter is dedicated to a long study of that poem.
In Chapter 15 (The Paradox of the Age), Harrison begins to pull together the main lines of his account. Once again, I rely on a quote rather than attempt a summary comment.
“The more we succeed in turning the earth into an inexhaustible inventory for human consumption, the more we abandon the postlapsarian vocation of care that turned human beings into cultivators of the mortal earth, as well as cultivators of our mortal codes of being on the earth. I have insisted throughout this study that human happiness is a cultivated rather than a consumer good, that it is a question of fulfillment rather than gratification. Neither consumption nor productivity fulfills. Only caretaking does. And we cannot destroy our way back to Eden, our craving for more life ends up militating against life itself.”
Finally, in his Epilogue, Harrison brings the account full circle, and I will rely here on one last quote.
“In the final analysis, Eve is the mother of the story. Whether she actually got us out of Eden or whether she merely got God out of Eden, the result is effectively the same. In either case we were handed over to our self-responsibility; in either case we were left in a garden we were called upon to keep; and we’re still there.”
My Summary
I hope that readers of “Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition” will recognise that they are in the hands of a master. The ability to pull together such a vast assembly of myth, literature, and religion using such fluid text is not a common one. Reading this book was for me an intellectual luxury.
Not for a moment do I doubt that people will find things to criticise. The image of a person living in a garden, tending it, and harvesting its produce, is one that has enormously deep psychological roots. The majority of people today don’t live in a physical garden, and probably couldn’t or wouldn’t really want to. There is no denying, however, that our physical well-being is anchored in the planet we ride on.
For me, even though this Edenic image is important and appealing, the allegorical aspect of Harrison’s account is at least equally important. The image of a custodial caretaker shines through it all. This is also the garden that Voltaire insists we must cultivate.
Sixteen years before “Gardens” was published, another of Harrison’s books, “Forests: The Shadow of Civilization” appeared. Harrison’s learning and lyricism is equally evident in “Forests”, and although it explores a very different theme, the two books together are remarkable.
This review is fairly long, but I want to allay any fears that it might be a spoiler. In this book, Harrison has presented an account that is complex, ramified, and elegant and I doubt that anything I write could do more than hint weakly at what he has accomplished. Delight will come to the reader from the details.
Gardens that are or might be considered physical occupy the first five chapters of the book: The Vocation of Care, Eve, The Human Gardner, Homeless Gardens, and Mon jardin à moi. Things then move on from there. But let me start at the top.
Harrison dedicates his book “To Eve and her daughters”, priming us for a discussion of the Garden of Eden. We do get that, but jumping from the dedication page, over the Preface and Acknowledgments, we move immediately into something quite different. Because there is another creation myth that explains the end result of the Eden story, but does so through a quite different route. That account begins at the Roman goddess Cura.
According to that account, it was Cura who formed homo sapiens from clay, and had Jupiter breathe life, spirit, into that clay. But the constellation of deities was roiling in jealousies, jockeying for advantage, and frequently engaged in argument and negotiation. An arrangement was worked out, under which homo sapiens was Cura’s charge. But this was just a temporary thing, since part of the agreement was that homo also would be mortal, and Cura enjoyed her privilege only as long as homo lived.
Harrison uses these two accounts, the Eden story and the Cura story, as the basis for a discussion that extends very fruitfully throughout the book. In the Eden story, Adam and Eve were not mortal, and they lived in a garden where they were entirely at ease. There was nothing they needed to do. It was Eve who convinced Adam to taste the forbidden fruit, something that caused them to be evicted from Eden, their immortal status to come to an end, and their new surroundings weighing them down with cares. But by rejecting immortality and accepting death, Eve accepted the responsibilities that come with a limited life span.
Through Cura, Harrison embarks on an invigorating discussion of ‘care’, and what a ‘garden’ really means. Care can mean a worry, or a burden, but it can also mean the act of looking after something. That something can be a garden, but ‘garden’ is also allegorical, and with this in mind, the wider meaning for Voltaire’s statement, il faut cultiver notre jardin, becomes evident immediately.
Harrison’s first five chapters speak of gardens and gardeners in a literal sense, every chapter being a delight of text that weaves together myth, literature, and some practical stuff of life. But beginning at Chapter 6, the wheels really leave the runway.
While harking back to Stanford’s Kingscote Garden (covered in Chapter 5 as “Mon jardin à moi”), Harrison moves the discussion to a broader context in Chapters 6 (Academos), 7 (The Garden School of Epicurus), and 8 (Boccaccio’s Garden Stories). I won’t relate any detail here, apart from saying that Academos refers to Plato’s Academy, the Garden School of Epicurus provides sharply relevant insights into an extraordinary philosopher, and Boccaccio’s Garden Stories takes a side trip into Boccaccio’s masterwork, The Decameron.
In Chapter 9 and onwards, we move through the centuries, and the shadows of our modern world begin to appear. Chapter 9 (Monastic, Republican, and Princely Gardens) talks of gardens that are becoming closed and are enclosed or exclusive places. Where previously a garden was an accessible spot embedded in a wider world but made special by the care lavished upon it by its gardener, now gardens become places of privilege. This change reaches its extreme, for Harrison, in the Sun King’s garden of Chapter 10, A Note on Versailles. At Versailles, nature, as a place where diversity and randomness operate, is suppressed and obliterated, and in its place is constructed a garden of severely imposed form, a monument to human pride, arrogance and caprice. Nature becomes a permanently indentured slave.
Chapters 11, 12, and 14 take the story much further, drifting deeper into the murk of our modern world. In Chapters 11 (The Lost Art of Seeing) and 12 (Sympathetic Miracles), Harrison writes of the lost ability of people even to detect the presence of a garden (either physical or metaphorical) and to see and appreciate what it contains and represents. Chapter 13 (The Paradise Divide: Islam and Christianity) was the only chapter in the book that seemed to me out of place. In Chapter 14 (Men Not Destroyers), we hit rock bottom. Rather than comment, I will cite some of Harrison’s text from this chapter.
On page 149:
“Here I propose to look more directly, call it more diagnostically, at this modern spiritual condition and to emphasise its pathology rather than its freedom seeking energies. Certainly one could say that our congenital Western restlessness is both the consequence and the cause of the loss of those basic structures that once used to direct and regulate the course of human action.”
And further along:
“As the defining spiritual condition of our late and perhaps even terminal modernity, the restlessness in question could be characterized as a whirlwind wherein those of us who are swept up in its turbulence are at once driven and aimless. This is a paradoxical condition, to be sure. To be both driven and aimless means that the impulses that set us into motion may have proximate goals but no ultimate aim, unless the perpetuation of aimless motion can be considered an aim in itself.”
Then finally:
“The reader who has made it this far in this book will have noticed that, in general, I tend to favour revelation over demonstration, embodied figures over analytical concepts, and the discernment of poets over the disquisitions of philosophers. That is why this is a book about gardens and not a book about the ethics of care. That is also why, when it comes to the present chapter, I feel that the first order of business is to seek out an emblem, or revelatory figure, for the aimless drivenness of our age. It so happens that I find such an emblem in what some people might consider an unlikely place: in the dusty archives of a by now antiquated – or apparently antiquated – literature.”
Harrison’s emblem is Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso. The remainder of the chapter is dedicated to a long study of that poem.
In Chapter 15 (The Paradox of the Age), Harrison begins to pull together the main lines of his account. Once again, I rely on a quote rather than attempt a summary comment.
“The more we succeed in turning the earth into an inexhaustible inventory for human consumption, the more we abandon the postlapsarian vocation of care that turned human beings into cultivators of the mortal earth, as well as cultivators of our mortal codes of being on the earth. I have insisted throughout this study that human happiness is a cultivated rather than a consumer good, that it is a question of fulfillment rather than gratification. Neither consumption nor productivity fulfills. Only caretaking does. And we cannot destroy our way back to Eden, our craving for more life ends up militating against life itself.”
Finally, in his Epilogue, Harrison brings the account full circle, and I will rely here on one last quote.
“In the final analysis, Eve is the mother of the story. Whether she actually got us out of Eden or whether she merely got God out of Eden, the result is effectively the same. In either case we were handed over to our self-responsibility; in either case we were left in a garden we were called upon to keep; and we’re still there.”
My Summary
I hope that readers of “Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition” will recognise that they are in the hands of a master. The ability to pull together such a vast assembly of myth, literature, and religion using such fluid text is not a common one. Reading this book was for me an intellectual luxury.
Not for a moment do I doubt that people will find things to criticise. The image of a person living in a garden, tending it, and harvesting its produce, is one that has enormously deep psychological roots. The majority of people today don’t live in a physical garden, and probably couldn’t or wouldn’t really want to. There is no denying, however, that our physical well-being is anchored in the planet we ride on.
For me, even though this Edenic image is important and appealing, the allegorical aspect of Harrison’s account is at least equally important. The image of a custodial caretaker shines through it all. This is also the garden that Voltaire insists we must cultivate.
Sixteen years before “Gardens” was published, another of Harrison’s books, “Forests: The Shadow of Civilization” appeared. Harrison’s learning and lyricism is equally evident in “Forests”, and although it explores a very different theme, the two books together are remarkable.
September 5, 2023
"The more we succeed in turning the earth into an inexhaustible inventory for human consumption, the more we abandon the postlapsarian vocation of care that turned human beings into cultivators of the mortal earth. ... When I say that the will of the present age to put all the fruits of the earth, as well as the fruits of world culture, at the disposal of human consumption is a blind drive, I mean that its dominant impulse is to perpetuate its own dynamism rather than to fulfill an end. Unlike the gardener, who 'wants eleven hundred years to to test, learn to know, and appreciate fully what he is' (Čapek), we are not projected enough into the future these days to fulfill an end, or to accomplish a purpose over time. Our action does not so much bear fruit as devour fruit. Thus we find ourselves in the paradoxical situation of seeking to re-create Eden by ravaging the garden itself--the garden of the biosphere on the one hand and the garden of human culture on the other."
July 13, 2019
Grounded in an analysis of Eden and the Fall, Harrison's philosophical work draws on mostly literary sources to analyze a major ailment of this age - the blind, incessant demand for more, more, more of everything (which gives only itself - feverish desire - as a result). The author not only provides a defense of Epicureanism, and correction of a common misperception thereof, he points the way out of such a hall of mirrors via cultivation of some of the classical virtues - temperance, prudence, courage. Most interesting to this reader was his explanation of what Eden means and doesn't mean, and why humans are not meant for it, in fact why we should not desire it. So why the title? Harrison grounds his analysis in a discussion of gardens both in their practical and philosophical meaning, showing how patience and gratitude, as well as the effort any garden requires, are necessary not only for the success of our efforts but are major fruits of that effort, for without them (and I take those two qualities for stand-ins for all the classical virtues), insatiable desire soon returns to torment our souls. Thoughtful and thought provoking.
April 5, 2018
really beautiful and inspiring. catnip for fans of his podcast. especially great for his application of hannah arendt's human condition and creative use of aristotle. he ends with an inspired look at dante's paradiso and orlando furioso. his vision is inspiring if you're looking for a critique of modernity that points towards something more uplifting. but he is very glib about east asian traditions in general. he should've actually learned about zen gardens or not mentioned them at all. hearing him integrate gregory schopen's recent work on the connection between gardens and buddhist monasteries in ancient india would've been interesting.
July 27, 2017
“Giardini” è un saggio talmente ricco di riferimenti, omaggi e citazioni letterarie, filosofiche, storiche da renderlo difficile da classificare. Non a caso la parola cultura affonda le sue radici nella terra. Il sottotitolo “Riflessioni sulla condizione umana” chiarisce subito che non si parla di giardini in termini botanici o naturalistici, ma chiamarlo saggio sembra alla fine riduttivo.
I giardini sono la metafora ideale per comprendere l’evoluzione dell’uomo fino alla “follia” dell’età contemporanea, come la definirebbero alcuni filosofi italiani che pur partono da altre premesse. Perché la pace è intesa come preludio di morte, perché all’Eden si preferisce la “felix culpa”, perché in Occidente bisogna agire, competere, superare, trasformare, produrre; perché oggi il desiderio chiede solo ancora altro desiderio e genera irrequietezza: la vita vuole altra vita, in un’avidità bulimica che oltre ad allontanarci dalla natura tout court, ci allontana dalla natura umana, dalla nostra fisiologia promettendo una immortalità garantita dalla scienza, dalla medicina: dalla tecnica direbbero Umberto Galimberti e Emanuele Serverino.
Dai giardini di Epicuro a quello del Candide di Voltaire, dall’”hortus conclusus” di Boccaccio ai chiostri monastici, dal giardino “invisibile” agli studenti dell’Università di Stanford a quello filosofico Zen: la lettura è intensa e molto istruttiva, dunque addirittura educativa e formativa per la maggioranza estranea al mondo tridimensionale, a proprio agio davanti alla TV o al computer ma cieca ai fenomeni naturali. Come ha scritto Milan Kundera l’europeo non guarda più il cielo, non sa più la forma della luna quando arriva e quando se ne va.
Sembra che i giardini nascano prima dell’agricoltura, espressione del bisogno tipicamente umano di trasfigurare e abbellire la realtà, sono addirittura terapeutici per i senzatetto che con le loro composizioni improvvisate a cielo aperto rivendicano una creatività, lottano per non perdersi del tutto e fissare il “punto fermo del mondo che ruota”, per dirla con T.S. Eliot. “Nessuna rivoluzione potrà accelerare i tempi della germinazione o far fiorire il lillà prima di maggio”: alla fine il giardiniere è un saggio, maturo e paterno, scrive Harrison citando Capek, qualcuno che dà più di quanto prenda (come dovrebbe valere in amicizia, nel matrimonio, nell’educazione), che si sottomette alle leggi della natura, come raccomandavano gli antichi Greci abitanti del Cosmo. Non pecca di hybris, non distrugge il giardino terreno e mortale che abita perché così facendo distruggerebbe anche se stesso.
I giardini sono la metafora ideale per comprendere l’evoluzione dell’uomo fino alla “follia” dell’età contemporanea, come la definirebbero alcuni filosofi italiani che pur partono da altre premesse. Perché la pace è intesa come preludio di morte, perché all’Eden si preferisce la “felix culpa”, perché in Occidente bisogna agire, competere, superare, trasformare, produrre; perché oggi il desiderio chiede solo ancora altro desiderio e genera irrequietezza: la vita vuole altra vita, in un’avidità bulimica che oltre ad allontanarci dalla natura tout court, ci allontana dalla natura umana, dalla nostra fisiologia promettendo una immortalità garantita dalla scienza, dalla medicina: dalla tecnica direbbero Umberto Galimberti e Emanuele Serverino.
Dai giardini di Epicuro a quello del Candide di Voltaire, dall’”hortus conclusus” di Boccaccio ai chiostri monastici, dal giardino “invisibile” agli studenti dell’Università di Stanford a quello filosofico Zen: la lettura è intensa e molto istruttiva, dunque addirittura educativa e formativa per la maggioranza estranea al mondo tridimensionale, a proprio agio davanti alla TV o al computer ma cieca ai fenomeni naturali. Come ha scritto Milan Kundera l’europeo non guarda più il cielo, non sa più la forma della luna quando arriva e quando se ne va.
Sembra che i giardini nascano prima dell’agricoltura, espressione del bisogno tipicamente umano di trasfigurare e abbellire la realtà, sono addirittura terapeutici per i senzatetto che con le loro composizioni improvvisate a cielo aperto rivendicano una creatività, lottano per non perdersi del tutto e fissare il “punto fermo del mondo che ruota”, per dirla con T.S. Eliot. “Nessuna rivoluzione potrà accelerare i tempi della germinazione o far fiorire il lillà prima di maggio”: alla fine il giardiniere è un saggio, maturo e paterno, scrive Harrison citando Capek, qualcuno che dà più di quanto prenda (come dovrebbe valere in amicizia, nel matrimonio, nell’educazione), che si sottomette alle leggi della natura, come raccomandavano gli antichi Greci abitanti del Cosmo. Non pecca di hybris, non distrugge il giardino terreno e mortale che abita perché così facendo distruggerebbe anche se stesso.
August 3, 2019
Some parts of this were 2 stars and others 4/5 - so hence my 3/4 stars over all.
Here's why.
The front half was frustrating with Harrison's complete misreading of the Eden story - i.e., the fall was a fall upwards! However, I found the comments in the closing chapters, on how we had to leave Eden to mature and the place the "garden" holds in our cultural memory representing the non-exploitative mode of existence we need to work for.
Harrison weaves all sorts of Renaissance and more modern literary material into his account, which was interesting and took me to authors and areas I had not considered before.
Here's why.
The front half was frustrating with Harrison's complete misreading of the Eden story - i.e., the fall was a fall upwards! However, I found the comments in the closing chapters, on how we had to leave Eden to mature and the place the "garden" holds in our cultural memory representing the non-exploitative mode of existence we need to work for.
Harrison weaves all sorts of Renaissance and more modern literary material into his account, which was interesting and took me to authors and areas I had not considered before.
April 22, 2022
A dear friend, who loves this book, suggested it. I read it to better get to know my friend. I really wasn't in the mood for The Greeks when I picked it up. It may very well deserve 4 stars, the author certainly is learned enough and composes good arguments. Anything that wasn't The Greeks held my attention and was engaging.
A solid book for sure.
A solid book for sure.
June 20, 2018
love this book! i found a copy at Prado Museum, so glad i took it home as a souvernir
September 27, 2011
Drawing from numerous literary sources, this Stanford professor explores the meanings of gardens and what they represent in the relationship of humans with culture and with each other as well as the natural world. Most of the book is wonderful, diverging into topics such as creativity, caretaking, education, and seeing. Up until the last three chapters I highly recommend the essay. However, the author’s thinking gets very muddled at the end. He uses one source, "Orlando Furioso," as evidence to draw conclusions about human destructiveness. Not only does the negativity undercut the thoughtful reflection of the preceding chapters, but it is difficult to understand just what the author is talking about. He refers to Christianity and Islam, modernity, and humans in general. However, he uses the pronoun “we” consistently, making it impossible to determine to whom his conclusions refer.
I would also recommend that the author actually visit the gardens in Japan. I found that his comments did not match my experience. While the the Zen gardens represent one set of values, there are also gardens designed for the emperor and the shogun that express a different view.
I would also recommend that the author actually visit the gardens in Japan. I found that his comments did not match my experience. While the the Zen gardens represent one set of values, there are also gardens designed for the emperor and the shogun that express a different view.
June 16, 2016
Understanding Pogue requires more literary and philosophical knowledge than I possess. so I found it best to re-read selected chapters of this wise book. The theme is expressed in the title of the first chapter, “The Vocation of Care.” Pogue is looking not so much at gardens as at the human responses to them, and how various gardens from Versailles to the gardens of the homeless, reflect the spirit of their times. Gardens to him are symbolic, but they are also a call to action, in the earth and in our lives beyond. He quotes Karel Capek’s ethical principle: “you must give more to the soil than you take away,” Pogue extends this: ”What holds true for the soil…also holds true for nations, institutions, marriage, friendship, education, in short for human culture as a whole, which comes into being and maintains itself only as long as its cultivators overgive of themselves.” A challenging book, but with many riches.
March 25, 2009
Harrison's wide-ranging exploration of the concept of "garden," how it has changed through time and across cultural divides, and how it relates to the human condition makes fascinating reading. Although some chapters took tangents that made them seem refugees from another book rather than elucidations of the main theme, I followed the author through the labyrinth, including the appendices, notes, and bibliography. I often found myself pausing to think about what I had read or mentally constructing a curriculum for a course in which this book would occupy a place in the syllabus. It is a book I will read again and one which has given me references to many more books I want to read. Reading the book is much like strolling through an interesting garden, admiring the design while being inspired to think creative thoughts of one's own.
May 25, 2014
I teach World Literature, and it amazing how the motif of the garden appears in literary texts from all cultures. I listen to Professor Harrison's podcasts called Entitled Opinions where he interviews many of his colleagues and guest lecturers from the Humanities department at Stanford. As a professor of Italian, it makes perfect sense that he would be alert to the setting of the garden since the storytellers of the Decameron congregate in this environment to give themselves a temporary reprieve from the plague for 1348. In Environmentalism 2.0, we have to face the reality that man has always been a part of nature-- he as never lived outside of this realm. Writers of world literature in both the West and the East have explored this relationship, and time will only tell if we are capable of being good stewards without killing ourselves.
August 1, 2013
I'm only about half way through this remarkable book, but am thoroughly smitten by the way Robert Pogue Harrison thinks. His task, it seems to me, is to understand how gardens, hardly necessary for human survival, have become so important to us culturally. To accomplish this, he quotes the Bible, Gilgamesh, Wallace Stevens, a Czech writer, Stendahl. The reader can see how gardens have saturated our literature/culture. Each chapter is organized around a facet of gardens (like Edenic ones or like the ad hoc gardens homeless people create around them), allowing Harrison to explore, interrogate, meditate upon what these spaces tell us about the connection between earth, human, and spirit. Not a quick read, but a profound book.
May 9, 2014
I love Harrison's longtime podcast, "Entitled Opinions," which takes on a wide variety of topics with the help of skillful guests and the very eloquent host, Harrison. I ordered this book based on appreciation for his way of thinking, and was not disappointed. "Gardens" is a collection of essays clustered around a theme. In it, he explores a great range of literature referring to the title subject, some of which I knew but much of which I didn't. Eden shows up early and holds a central place in the discussion of garden as it relates to our being, doing, and striving. Ultimately, this discussion of the place of quiet contemplations and manual labor, the garden, is worth both your contemplation and your labors in reading it.
September 17, 2008
Most of Gardens is an idiosyncratic stroll through some literary gardens - Plato's Academy, Epicurean thought, Bocaccio's Decameron, as well as inspiration from contemporary urban gardens. The book was most exciting for me in the chapters comparing the Islamic paradise to the Christian, and in that summarizing Orlando Furioso. These present the idea that modern Western man fears serenity (as boredom, passivity, indifference) and has an innate restlessness and longing for drama and heroism. This seems akin to Ernest Becker's immortality projects. Harrison argues for cultivation of/service to gardens as a way to patience and wisdom as an alternative to this terrible restlessnes of spirit.
August 12, 2015
An interesting read, not so much about the function of gardens throughout history, as it is a treatise on the human condition. From the gardens of ancient civilizations to modern edifices, the author embraces the belief that the garden was a touch stone against the losses that humanity has endured throughout the centuries. Some of these gardens will be instantly recognizable, while others will come to life in your imagination. Cultivating one's garden seems a rather simple endeavour and with the author's gentle reminder of what a garden truly encompasses [the human condition], we are better able to understand how and why gardens have endured and will endure throughout time immemorial.
September 5, 2018
An enlightening concept that helped me think about the effect of humans on the environment, and the necessity of the garden to the human psyche. In our world that is becoming more aware of global climate change, and the affects of our actions on the earth, when we respond with more sustainable technologies and gadgets, it is so easy to forget about the garden as a crucial part of being human.
Some thoughts, for example, the author's take on the Garden of Eden, are misguided and ill-informed, in my opinion. But he highlights a conversation that is necessary none the less - why do we make gardens?
A good read.
Some thoughts, for example, the author's take on the Garden of Eden, are misguided and ill-informed, in my opinion. But he highlights a conversation that is necessary none the less - why do we make gardens?
A good read.
December 9, 2012
Another fine meditation and critical study of man's relationship to nature, this time through the lens of "the garden". From the Garden of Eden, to Japanese zen gardens, to manicured formal gardens, to tiny spaces in homeless encampments, Robert Pogue Harrison explores mankind's need for gardens -- their importance as quiet spaces in which we can relate to nature on a human scale, as retreats for quieting and refilling the spirit, as sources of literary and romantic inspiration, as windows into biological process and truth.
September 4, 2008
This is not a book about gardening, but how the importance of gardens in religion, mythology and religion points to an essential human characteristic: the need to give care. He speaks about many gardens and cites many literary sources from Gilgamesh, Genesis, Odyssey, Dante's Inferno and Bocaccio's Decameron. Interesting is his take on the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, which he attributes to Eve's need for a life of care, while the Garden of Eden was carefree
September 12, 2011
I give it 4 stars because it is extremely thought provoking. It is essentially a serious evaluation of mortality and death. He challenges immortality as fundamentally undesirable and unhuman. Though I think a critical error is his equivocation about Eden, Christian afterlife, other immortalities. Adam was put in the garden to work, and Eve was put there to help him work, which really strains his understanding of Eden as a mindless and effortless enjoyment of pleasures.
October 4, 2009
An intriguing essay on who we are, as depicted in real, imaginary, historical, mythological, and literary gardens. Why did Eve loathe Eden? Why did Odysseus leave Circe? Why didn't Ariosto's knights find fulfillment? Are gardens of sand a paradise found or lost? Do you love (y)our garden? Rich in exploration of such ideas, this is a fascinating, thought-provoking book.
May 7, 2011
Reading this book is like walking through a many-roomed garden. It imparts some of the same kind of serenity and space for reflection. In courageous and venerable humanistic tradition, Pogue writes a book meant to transform his readers. At its best, the essays offer concise but penetrating insights (on Ariosto, care), though sometimes the concision makes for a reductive summing up.
July 24, 2012
As a horticulturist I thought it was about gardens and it is but it is more about the literature of gardens. An excellent book by a true lover of language and literature. Check out his Entitled Opinions radio show.
June 9, 2015
Although this book reads, at times, like a Master's thesis, the ideas it contains are very suggestive and beautiful. It points to many lovely primary texts (Capek and Calvino, etc.) and will give voice to many gardeners at least a part of their motivation.
March 1, 2011
Started 3/7/09
December 11, 2012
True work of philosophy. Held my attention through the first half. Covers many garden stories from antiquity.
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