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Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

Of cabbages and kings

Robert Pogue Harrison
University of Chicago Press, 248pp, £12.50,

Jonathan Bate

Wednesday, 1st October 2008

Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison

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., with its lemming-like leaps from mandarin French theory to each latest fashion in identity politics, 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 of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, published in 1992, has the true quality of literature, not criticism — it stays with you, like an amiable ghost, long after you have read it.

Though more modest in scope, this new book is similarly destined to become a classic. It has two principal heroes: the ancient philosopher, Epicurus, of whom more anon, and the wonderfully witty 20th-century 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’.

Harrison’s subtitle is ‘An Essay on the Human Condition’, and the book does indeed have all the qualities of the essay form, as invented by Michel de Montaigne: it is digressive, looping, surprising, instinctive and happy rather than logical and historical in its inclusions and exclusions. The sole unconscionable omission is Montaigne himself, who wrote an essay called ‘That to philosophise is to learn how to die’, in which he argued that the best way to die would be to be struck down suddenly whilst setting cabbages, careless of death’s dart, thinking only of one’s imperfect garden.

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