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.

Preface
Acknowledgments                   
 
1          The Vocation of Care
2          Eve                 
3          The Human Gardener  
4          Homeless Gardens                   
5          “Mon jardin à moi”                  
6          Academos                   
7          The Garden School of Epicurus            
8          Boccaccio’s Garden Stories                 
9          Monastic, Republican, and Princely Gardens    
10        A Note on Versailles   
11        On the Lost Art of Seeing                    
12        Sympathetic Miracles   
13        The Paradise Divide: Islam and Christianity       
14        Men Not Destroyers 

15        The Paradox of the Age           
 
Epilogue          
Appendixes

1          From The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio    
2          From Mr. Palomar, Italo Calvino                    
3          “The Garden,” Andrew Marvell                       
4          A Note on Islamic Carpet Gardens      

Notes              
Works Cited               
Index

"In this book's two great predecessors, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison took two preoccupying images of the human psyche and considered them with a depth and originality that revealed their unlimited and unbroken presence in every assumption and moment of our lives. Gardens he describes modestly as an essay, but it does, or at least suggests, the same kind of pervasive presence of an underlying human impulse in our relation to the world around us. He does it with eloquence, grace, and erudition rooted in the literatures of his four native languages (including Turkish) that informed his earlier books. The range of his perspective on the human myth suggests that he may be our Bachelard."-W. S. Merwin

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.

Imprint: University Of Chicago Press
Distributor: Chicago Distribution Center
Publication Date: 05-15-2008
Pages: 262
Measurements: 8.50in X 5.50in