Mandahla: Gardens
Gardens is a dazzling and inventive book. Every page has a thought-provoking idea; every page has a passage that you'll want to share with someone. Robert Hogue Harrison, a Stanford professor of Italian literature, contemplates gardens through numerous lenses--literature, of course, from Dante's Paradiso to Malcom Lowry's Under the Volcano to Pablo Neruda; or anthropology, with the idea that the first gardens came before agriculture and were created for purposes that were ritualistic and magical, not economic or productive. With that thought, he ponders the gardens homeless people create, saying that gardens are a response to human needs that are not reducible to our animal needs.
Beginning with Eden, the first garden, Harrison says that only after the fall did Adam acquire "a measure of resiliency and character." Nothing was at stake for Adam and Eve "until suddenly, in one decisive moment of self-revelation, everything was at stake. Such were the garden's impossible alternatives: live in moral oblivion within its limits or gain a sense of reality at the cost of being thrown out." The question for Harrison is whether the gift of the Garden of Eden "was wasted on us prior to the price we paid through our expulsion . . . Adam and Eve were altogether too beautiful, hence also heartless. They had to earn their human hearts outside of the garden, if only in order to learn what beauty is, as well as what a gift it is . . . It was only by leaving the Garden of Eden behind that they could realize their potential to become cultivators and givers, instead of mere consumers and receivers."
In discussing Islamic extremism and Western modernity, he talks about the "craving in the Western soul that cannot be fulfilled by the ideal of serenity or the self-contained contentment of Eden . . . In the West we tend to speak of 'Islamic extremism' as if the West were the measure of moderation. Yet the paradox is that Islamic extremists long for a garden where all is moderation and temperance, while we in the modern West are driven by the need to constantly act . . . driven by compulsions that assume any number of extreme manifestations."
There is a need in people to transfigure reality; there are "aspects of our humanity which nature does not naturally accommodate." Gardens are one type of accommodation and "stand as a kind of haven, if not a kind of heaven." Think about that while weeding, or battling slugs, and see the garden with new eyes.--Marilyn Dahl
