Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

An essay-review of Stanford literature professor Robert Pogue Harrison's 2008 book of the same name, arguing that gardens recur across cultures and centuries because they are how human beings make life bearable in the face of history's Medusa-stare of rage, death, and suffering. From Gilgamesh and Eden to Plato's Academy, Boccaccio's Decameron villa, the Jardin du Luxembourg, and homeless gardens in New York, the garden is never a private retreat but a common enterprise: Voltaire's "il faut cultiver notre jardin." Eden was only redeemed by the Fall, which gave Eve and Adam the dignity of cultivation; today, the essay argues, capitalist consumerism is paradoxically devouring the biosphere garden in its effort to re-create Eden.