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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 Qu'ran; 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.
Robert Pogue Harrison is the Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of four books, including Forests: The Shadow of Civilization and The Dominion of the Dead, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
I find myself completely besotted by a new book titled Gardens. 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 "Mr. Harrison has planted his own garden of beautiful quotations and provocative speculation, and it is an absorbing and stimulating place to spend time." - Jonathan Rosen, Wall Street Journal "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 "The year's most thought-provoking, original, and weighty garden book is Gardens.... Reading Harrison's book is like strolling down a path through a well-cultivated, richly sown, light-dappled woodland.... Just as in the making of a garden, there's no end to the wonder; the journey is everything." - New York Times Book Review"
