Time is all we have because time is what we are — which is why the undoing of time, of time’s promise of itself, is the undoing of our very selves.
In the dismorrowed undoing of 2020 — as Zadie Smith was calibrating the limitations of Stoic philosophy in a world suddenly time-warped by a global quarantine, suddenly sobered to the perennial uncertainty of the future — loss beyond the collective heartache besieged the miniature world of my sunny-spirited, largehearted friend and Caldecott-winning children’s book maker Sophie Blackall. She coped the way all artists cope, complained the way all makers complain: by making something of beauty and substance, something that begins as a quickening of self-salvation in one’s own heart and ripples out to touch, to salve, maybe even to save others — which might be both the broadest and the most precise definition of art.
One morning under the hot shower, Sophie began making a mental list of things to look forward to — a lovely gesture of taking tomorrow’s outstretched hand in that handshake of trust and resolve we call optimism.
№3: hot shower
As the list grew and she began drawing each item on it, she noticed how many were things that needn’t wait for some uncertain future — unfussy gladnesses readily available in the now, any now. A century after Hermann Hesse extolled “the little joys” as the most important habit for fully present living, Sophie’s list became not an emblem of expectancy but an invitation to presence — not a deferral of life but a celebration of it, of the myriad marvels that come alive as soon as we become just a little more attentive, a little more appreciative, a little more animated by our own elemental nature as “atoms with consciousness” and “matter with curiosity.”
№5: hugging a friend
Sophie began sharing the illustrated meditations on her Instagram (which is itself a rare island of unremitting delight and generosity amid the stream of hollow selfing we call social media) — each part record of personal gladness, part creative prompt. Delight begets delight — people began sending her their responses to these prompts: unbidden kindnesses done for neighbors, unexpected hobbies taken up, and oh so many sweet strange faces drawn on eggs.
You can relish a rainbow and a cup of tea, sunrise and a flock of birds, a cemetery walk and a friend’s newborn, the first blush of wildflowers in a patch of dirt and the looping rapture of an old favorite song. You can’t tidy up the White House, but you can tidy up that neglected messy corner of your home; you can’t mend a world, but you can mend the hole in the polka-dot pocket of your favorite coat. They are not the same thing, but they are part of the same thing, which is all there is — life living itself through us, moment by moment, one broken beautiful thing at a time.
№48: walking in cemeteries№22: weddings№10: first snow
Sophie writes in the preface:
I have always been a cheerful sort of person, able to find the silver lining in just about any cloud, but 2020 was a son-of-a-cumulonimbus. There was the pandemic, of course, which knocked us all sideways. Like most people, I tried to remain hopeful, counting my blessings, grateful to be alive when so many were dying. But also like most people, I was full of anxiety and fear and grief and uncertainty. My partner, Ed, and I worried about bills, fretted about my aging parents, and missed our kids, who were living away from home. Deciding to downsize, we moved out of the apartment we had happily rented for ten years with our blended family, the longest either of us had ever lived anywhere. We canceled our wedding, because we knew we couldn’t get married without our loved ones. Then in the fall, Nick, the dear, queer father of my children, died in an accident on the other side of the world. The thunderclouds really closed in then, and for a while I struggled to find any rays of hope. I almost lost sight of beauty and wonder and delight.
With an eye to the dangerous seductions of nostalgia — that longing not for a bygone time but for the bygone selves and certitudes that time contained — she adds:
I have often found myself romanticizing the Before Times, when we could travel the world and hug our friends and shake hands with strangers, but I have come to the conclusion that it’s better to look forward: to gather the things we’ve learned and use our patience and perseverance and courage and empathy to care for each other and to work toward a better future for all people. To look forward to things like long-term environmental protection and racial justice; equal rights and an inclusive society; free health care and equitable education; an end to poverty, hunger, and war. But we can also look forward to everyday things that will buoy our spirits and make us laugh and help us feel alive and that will bring others comfort and hope.
№27: collecting pebbles
Tucked between the quiet joys of painting on pebbles and rereading a favorite passage from a favorite book and enfolding a loved one in a simple hug is the unfailing consolation of the cosmic perspective and its simplest, most enchanting guise, which the visionary Margaret Fuller reverenced, a century and a half earlier amid a world torn by revolutions and economic collapse, as “that best fact, the Moon.”
№21: a full moon
In the twenty-first entry, devoted to the full Moon, Sophie writes:
Wherever we are in the world, we see the same moon. It’s the same moon earliest humans would have seen, waxing and waning, rising and setting. Depending on where we were thousands of years ago, we would look to a full moon to mark time, to tell us when to plant corn, when to lay the rice to dry, and when to expect the ducks back. Now we look to the moon and marvel that men have traveled there in unlikely contraptions and actually set foot on its surface. It is our stepping-stone to the vast universe, and looking at a full moon can make us feel very small and very young. But it can also remind us to make the most of our time here on earth, to pop corn and throw rice and watch for ducks.
№44: doing your taxes№8: applause№31: moving the furniture around№25: new glasses
What makes the book so wondrous is that each seemingly mundane thing on the list shimmers with an aspect of the miraculous, each fragment of the personal opens into the universal, each playful wink at life grows wide-eyed with poignancy.
In the thirtieth entry, titled “Clean Laundry” and illustrated with a stack of neatly folded grey T-shirts, Sophie writes:
I tend to put off washing clothes until the last possible day, when I’m reduced to leggings with holes and the mustard top that inspires people to ask if I’m feeling OK, but clean laundry means a whole closet of possibilities. I can dress like a nineteenth-century French farmer or an Edwardian ghost or a deckhand on a whaler off Nantucket. Actually, those are pretty much my three options, but there are many subtle variations.
My clothes are pre-owned, unruly, and difficult to fold, but my partner wears a uniform. Not the kind with epaulets or creased slacks or his name embroidered on his chest, but a deliberate, self-selected uniform. Ed is a playwright and a teacher, and he heeds the advice of Gustave Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
Once a year, he purchases six gray T-shirts and a dozen pairs of black socks and multiples of carefully chosen, unremarkable shirts and pants. On laundry day, his neatly folded piles of clean clothes are so dear and familiar they put a lump in my throat.
Pulsating through the book, through the list, through the life is the one thing that saves us all: love — the love of partners and of friends, of children and of flowers, of books and music and list-making and this whole improbable living world. Indeed, the entire book is one extended love letter to life itself, composed of the miniature, infinite loves that animate any given life.
In entry №37, titled “Falling in Love,” Sophie writes:
I met my husband, Nick, when I was twenty-one, and we moved in together before the year was out. We got married when I was twenty-five, and I had my first child at twenty-six. But I didn’t fall in love, not properly, until I was thirty-six. And it wasn’t with my husband. It wasn’t that Nick and I didn’t love each other. We did. We were best friends. He could play “My Funny Valentine” on his teeth and make anything out of nothing: a 1930s-style playhouse, a shirt out of a vintage tablecloth, Halloween costumes that made the news. He had a blinding temper, but he was as funny as he was angry, so I laughed at least as much as I cried. When we met, he thought he was 5 percent gay. It turned out he was 5 percent straight. But that was enough to make two excellent children, and we thought we were happy.
Days with young children can pass by in a blur of drop-offs and pickups, bath time and bedtime, Hot Wheels and carrot sticks and Shrinky Dinks. If you’re in love with your partner I can imagine finding moments to notice each other, managing, even through the blur, to see one another clearly. But if you’re not sure, then you can become kind of blurry yourself.
Later, when I met Ed, the man I would fall in love with, I was still a bit blurry, but I saw him in distinct detail. I noticed everything: his beautiful profile, his generous ears, his kind eyes. The way he shoved his T-shirt sleeve up on his handsome shoulder as he talked. His heartbreakingly neat handwriting. The way he was always reading, even when he was walking down the street, underlining without breaking stride. The way he carried everything in a stack: book, extra book, notebook, pen, phone, as though he’d never heard of bags. The way he followed a recipe and put all the ingredients in little bowls. The way his tongue stuck out when he chopped onions or dribbled a basketball or tied a child’d shoe. The way he made all the babies laugh. The way he made me laugh. The way he made my hands tremble.
And I noticed the way he noticed me too. He saw me more clearly than anyone had, ever before.
And bit by bit, I realized that I’d previously had no idea, no idea on earth, what it was to be in love and to be loved in return. Those were heady days. Fourteen years later, they still are. The point is, of course, that you can look forward to falling in love with the love of your life, day after day. If you haven’t found love yet, or found it and lost it, then it can find you, perhaps when you least expect it.
№37: falling in love
Complement Things to Look Forward to, to which neither screen nor synthesis do service, with Sophie’s splendid animation of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Dirge Without Music” — a sort of mirror-image counterpart to this elemental awareness that our time, finite and savage with creative force, is all we have — then revisit her illustrated celebration of our shared world.
“A history of exercise is not really — or certainly not only — a history of the body. It is, equally, perhaps even primarily, a history of the mind.”
By Maria Popova
“And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?” wondered Whitman two years before he wrote a manual on “manly health and training” and two decades before he recovered from his paralytic stroke with a rigorous exercise regimen in the gymnasium of the wilderness.
But this natural equivalence, as obvious as it was to Whitman and as evident as the neurophysiology of consciousness is making it in our own epoch — was opaque, even obscene, for much of human history.
The world’s first known book on exercise was written almost exactly two millennia ago, sometime in the 220s, by the Greek philosopher and teacher Flavius Philostratus, then in his fifties. In On Gymnastics, he argued that athletic training is an art and “a form of wisdom,” on par with the other arts, no less beautiful or substantive than poetry or music. His treatise was in part an act of resistance to the wave of oppression and erasure sweeping in with the new regime of Roman rule and the advent of Christianity, which was beginning to eradicate the ancient Greek culture of Olympic Games and casual athletics, of public bathhouses and gymnasia.
Under Christian doctrine, the body was too sinful an instrument to be afforded public celebration or private homilies. The cerebral solemnity of the cathedral replaced the joyful physicality of the gymnasium, where crowds had once gathered as much to tone their bodies as to hone their minds on Plato and Aristotle’s philosophy lectures. (The one place where Christianity and ancient Greek culture converged was that women were not permitted to compete in the Olympic Games or enter the gymnasium — even though the athletic Plato, outlining the laws of civilization in his last and longest dialogue, decreed that “women, both young and old, should exercise… together with the men” — and, to this day, women are not permitted to sing in the Vatican choir or hold major leadership positions in the Catholic Church.)
And so it is that the notion of exercise fell out of the popular imagination for a millennium. The word itself did not enter the English language until the fourteenth century, when it was originally used in the context of animal farming and husbandry, meaning “to remove restraint.” Like the etymological evolution of “to lose,” “to exercise” came to encompass other contexts beyond the literal and the physical: one could exercise restraint, or altruism, or caution. But not one’s body — not yet.
And then, in the sixteenth century, while roaming the ruins of Greek and Roman gymnasia, an Italian physician named Girolamo Mercuriale (September 30, 1530–November 8, 1606) took it upon himself “to restore to the light the art of exercise, once so highly esteemed, and now plunged into deepest obscurity and utterly perished.” Far ahead of his time on both the scale of a lifetime and the scale of civilization, Mercuriale was only twenty-two when, writing a treatise on parenting, he made a passionate case against the prevalent use of wet nurses, insisting instead that breastfeeding by mothers made for healthier and happier children. His work inspired the world’s first formal proposal for physical education in school curricula, made by the English educator on whom Shakespeare modeled the schoolmaster in Love’s Labor Lost.
Girolamo Mercuriale. (Copperplate engraving by Johann Theodore de Bry, 1650.)
But Mercuriale’s most lasting legacy was the 1573 book De Arte Gymnastica, or The Art of Exercise. (Incidentally, in my native Bulgarian, the academic term for gym class translates verbatim to “physical art.”) On its pages — writing in an elaborate form of medieval Latin that only a handful of scholars can translate today — Mercuriale resolved:
I have taken as my province to restore to the light the art of exercise, once so highly esteemed, and now plunged into deepest obscurity and utterly perished… Why no one else has taken this on, I dare not say. I know only that this is a task of both maximum utility and enormous labor.
If there is one person in the modern world who can reinvigorate Mercuriale’s enormous unfinished labor and bridge the physical, the philosophical, and the poetic — bridge Whitman and Warhol, Plato and Peloton, Kafka and Curie, Tennessee Williams and Serena Williams; bridge the “immediate bodily now” of exercise with “the wisdom of the past that had faded from living memory” — it is Bill Hayes. And so he does, in Sweat: A History of Exercise (public library) — an expedition, both existential and historical, spanning two thousand years and three continents, exploring “how the arts of exercise were invented, lost, and rediscovered,” raising questions about what distinguishes exercise from practice, labor, or sports; about whether, like art forms and literary genres and languages, there are “certain forms of exercise that are similarly endangered or have already gone extinct — unrecorded, undescribed”; questions like:
Do you choose your form of exercise, or does it choose you?
At the heart of Mercuriale’s work, written in a world of pre-scientific almost-medicine, was his exultant fascination with “how utterly mysterious — and therefore miraculous — the human body could be,” as Hayes puts it four and a half centuries later, animated by the same exultant fascination as he undertakes his biography of an idea: this ancient yet perennially strange idea that our lives unfold inside bodies in motion across space and time, dragging mind and spirit along for the ride. What emerges is a lovely fusion of the scholarly and the sensual, the personal and the universal, the playful and the poignant, radiant with Hayes’s delight in the elegant machinery of our bodies and the minds they carry — that transcendent place where physiology and psychology converge to produce something best described as spiritual.
Ancient tomb painting of divers in Tarquinia, Italy.
He writes:
A history of exercise is not really — or certainly not only — a history of the body. It is, equally, perhaps even primarily, a history of the mind — of will, desire, self-discipline — for one cannot get exercise without an intentional wish, a motivation, a reason, to do so.
Just as neuroscience is now revealing how somatic feeling might have given rise to complex consciousness, and not the other way around, Hayes follows evolutionary theory to its pleasantly unsettling intimation that the athletic use of the body may have fomented the development of brain size and cognitive capacity in early humans, and not the other way around.
To reveal the evolutionary and cultural history of the body as so deeply intertwined with the mind is to face afresh our limited and limiting standard model of intelligence. With an eye to Plato, who believed that the body and the mind should be harmonized and cultivated with equal devotion, he writes:
As one can see most obviously in gifted athletes and performers, the body itself can be a source of knowledge — coordination, grace, agility, stamina, skill — both intuitive and learned. Indeed, there are a rare few who might be called Einsteins of the body — geniuses at inventing, expressing, and employing movement. Is that not what the choreographer Mark Morris is? Or Serena Williams?
Ancient fresco of young boxers in Akrotiri, Greece.
Woven into the cultural history is Hayes’s personal history — growing up with five sisters and a hyperathletic father who had once been captain of the West Point swim team; learning boxing at a gym that had once been a used bookstore he frequented with his partner until his sudden death of a heart attack, young and strong, in the middle of the night in their bed in San Francisco; starting his life over in New York, where he becomes one of the city’s foremost street photographers and falls in love again — with the irreplaceable Oliver Sacks, whom Hayes memorialized in his splendid previous book and whose loving memory haunts this one, particularly the chapters on swimming. But even Hayes’s bereavement — which occasioned his break with exercise after a lifetime of devotion, which in turn occasioned his interest in the history of how the body and the soul entwine in the act of exercise — is radiant with love:
This whole phase, this breakup that exercise and I had, started not long after I lost Oliver, who died at eighty-two in August 2015. We used to swim together two or three times a week — usually a mile-long swim at a nearby pool—sharing a lane and often splitting a weekly session with a swim coach. We swam wherever we could — in cold mountain lakes, in salty seas, and in New York’s overchlorinated public pools. We swam at elegant hotels in London and Iceland, Jerusalem and San Francisco. We went scuba diving in Curaçao and St. Croix. One of the funniest memories I have is of swimming with Oliver in the huge public pool in Central Park on a steamy hot summer night — so hot that the pool was jammed with swimmers, kids, families, New Yorkers. The few lifeguards on deck were frantically trying to impose some order, keeping boys from cannonballing or dive-bombing, their whistles blaring above the din. But it was a lost cause, more like swimming in Times Square. And there in the middle of it all was Oliver, half-blind but indomitable, trying to do laps as I swam right beside him, his stressed-out bodyguard.
Cave painting of swimmers in the Western desert of Egypt.
Hayes approaches his history of exercise with the same total and indomitable devotion, diving as ardently into archives as into mountain lakes, trailing rare book librarians and training with boxing champions. Along the way, he encounters a cast of wondrous characters, dead and alive: an elderly retired schoolteacher in Kansas City with one good eye and the excellent name Miss Irene Blasé, who spent years translating Mercuriale’s works into English for the first time, four hundred years after they were written, and died at ninety a year before her labor was published; an archivist at the Academy of Medicine in East Harlem, part “twenty-first century Minerva” and part dandelion with her tall slight frame “crowned by a nimbus of pewter gray,” who shepherds Hayes’s first encounter with Mercuriale’s original work in a rare surviving volume “the weight of a small dumbbell or a large human brain”; a very English elderly historian of medicine and former Cambridge don “with the aspect of a majestic bird” and the excellent name Dr. Vivian Nutton, who rings six-hundred-pound church bells for exercise; a very French elderly scholar of Mercuriale’s work, obsessed with American pop comics and the question of what it means to have a body, who had been raised Catholic, then traveled to India to study yoga and meditation with the masters and to America for encounter groups and primal scream therapy; legendary chef Alice Waters, who tells him during a chance encounter in Rome that she wakes up at 7 each morning and goes for a 45-minute walk no matter where she is and no matter the weather — her miniature act of resistance to humanity’s lost association between “exercise and manual work, exercise and nature”; Ruth Bader Ginsburg who, in her eighties, staggers him with the matter-of-fact report that she does twenty push-ups every day; an enormously tall man with long hair and a bushy beard, who looks like a time-traveler from the Middle Ages and who hand-delivers to him, at the majestic redwood reading table of a French library, the three-foot rare book he had voyaged there to see.
Wrestlers from De Arte Gymnastica by Girolamo Mercuriale, 1573.
Over and over, he perseveres over the militant boredom of the bureaucrats who are so often the keepers of the keys to the reliquary of culture, so often more wardens than stewards of scholarship. The archetype culminates in an apathetic French public librarian who, looking down at the printout of his research query, looks up at him with sour skepticism and issues the bored indictment Why? before giving him vague directions to some other office. (There is hardly a burn more painful to your research passions than a librarian’s imperious dismissal of your query — I say this with the scorched surety of both a frequent archive dweller and the daughter of a defected librarian.)
Walking the seemingly infinite empty corridors of the Parisian public library and getting nowhere, Hayes thinks about Aristotle’s reckoning with the physically fatiguing effects of infinity, then distracts himself from “the vaguely existential meaninglessness” of his project by making the act of walking itself part of the investigation. (This might be what separates great minds from lesser minds, or perhaps just artists from non-artists — what occasions boredom or frustration in some occasions curiosity and a quickening of creativity in others.)
One might consider walking the simplest of exercises. But this is hardly so, as someone who has to regain the ability to walk would certainly know. Some two dozen major muscles of the lower body are involved in every cycle of walking — a cycle being the split — second from the contact of one foot on the ground to the next contact of the same foot. And far more is happening than simply forward locomotion. A physical therapist once put it to me this way: “Think of walking as a series of aborted falls.” The muscles of the hips, legs, and feet are just as involved in keeping one from collapsing as they are in keeping one moving. The hamstrings — the long powerful muscles behind the legs — are chiefly responsible here. They reach their peak of activity as they “arrest movement” at the hip joint at the moment the heel strikes the ground. The quadriceps femoris — the bundle of four muscles otherwise known as the thigh — then begin to contract to control the load being imposed on the knee joint by the body.
Queen Hatshepsut performing the ritual run of the Egyptian jubilee celebration, designed to reaffirm the divine powers of the ruling pharaoh, male or female.
But no poetry of motion has reverberated through the hallways of history and the human bodymind more powerfully than walking amplified. “Running is supreme,” Mercuriale had declaimed in his treatise, and so Hayes picks up the declamation as both spiritual incantation and scientific inquiry:
I make this my mantra:
Running is supreme, I think, as I wait for a light to change green in front of my building.
Running is supreme: as I dodge cars and dogs on leashes and bicyclists on the sidewalk.
Running is supreme: as I reach the Hudson and head down the West Side of Manhattan on a smoothly paved path.
What made running supreme in Mercuriale’s mind was not only that it met the definition for exercise he carefully laid out in his book, but that it is “granted to all.” Anyone is capable of doing it — man, woman, child. One doesn’t need a gymnasium. One doesn’t need equipment or an opponent. (Not even shoes are necessary, some today say, following the longtime practice of the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico, although ultimately one’s feet may disagree.) One needs only healthy lungs and a pair of reasonably strong legs. I am acutely conscious of mine as they run, how they do this automatically. But I also find myself enjoying willing them to do what I like, as if I were driving a car. I take a right and run to the end of a pier. I run backward, then forward, and then steer back to where I began. I never look down. Each of my feet will touch the ground a thousand times, at least, perhaps twice that, for every mile I cover, while absorbing three times my body weight.
This exquisite automation is a hard-earned, long-honed gift of evolution. Although many animal species are bipedal, very few others can walk or stand upright at all, and almost none of them can run for more than an awkward teeter across a short distance. The human body owes its gift of running largely to women: its upright spine evolved to alleviate the weight distribution of pregnancy and its wider hips to make childbirth safer for both mother and infant as an increasingly large cranium, housing an increasingly powerful brain, had to pass through the birth canal.
Fourth-century mosaic on the floor of a Roman villa.
In a passage evocative of Alison Bechdel’s kindred-spirited masterpiece of personal and cultural history, Hayes details the science behind the elaborate symphony of aliveness that plays itself through us when we partake of this deceptively simple activity:
When one is running, time passes differently. I can get from here to there quickly — quickness is embodied, experienced — and I can keep going. I will run until I feel tired, until I’ve had enough, and then I will go just a little farther, at which point a wave of well-being-ness washes over me. This is not coincidental. My brain is rewarding me for doing something grueling that is beneficial to my overall health — and providing an incentive to do it again. Sustained activity triggers the release of specific neurochemicals, endorphins, which have a kind of tranquilizing effect. On top of that, the body gets a deposit of human growth factor, a repairer of muscle tissue, as well as specialized proteins that, according to new research, are involved in the creation of neurons and the connections between them, synapses.
Then there is the evolutionary glory of sweat — a development so miraculous that Hayes takes it for the title of his book; a development enveloped in a cautionary cultural history of how religious dogma has repeatedly stood in the way of science, which is the way of knowledge and wonder. Under the longstanding prohibition of cadaver dissection by the major religions, the true mechanism of how and why we sweat remained a mystery. Instead, there were ample theories — all spectacular, all wrong — by some of humanity’s most curious and visionary minds: Plato and Galen, Hippocrates and Avicenna, and Mercuriale himself, who . It was only after the discovery of sweat glands — the structure of which Hayes poetically likens to “the stem of a tiny hydroponic flower turned upside down,” and which form by the millions in utero — that sweat was revealed to be the great thermostatic regulator of our precarious homeostasis.
Marilyn Monroe working out. (Photograph by Philippe Halsman, 1952.)
Radiating from his chronicle of the history and science behind the varieties of physical activity we now call exercise is a reminder that every form of movement is tethered to the corpus of culture by an invisible chainlink of values and assumptions, permissions and prohibitions; that every exercise — from the commonest to the most esoteric — reflects the body politic and emanates an ethic of thought.
There is dueling, once condemned by the church and punished with excommunication, which evolved into an art — the art of fencing, now both an Olympic sport and an intellectual exercise celebrated as “physical chess.”
There is yoga, an ancient Indian practice on which a nineteenth-century Swede based his system of mass group exercise, which was then adopted by the British Army during its colonial occupation of India.
Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Bronson Alcott, Michael Pollan, Jamaica Kincaid, and more.
By Maria Popova
Something happens when you are in a garden, when you garden — something beyond the tactile reminder that, in the history of life on Earth, without flowers, there would be no us. Kneeling between the scale of seeds and the scale of stars, touching evolutionary time and the cycle of seasons at once, you find yourself rooted more deeply into your own existence — transient and transcendent, fragile and ferociously resilient — and are suddenly humbled into your humanity. (Lest we forget, humility comes from humilis — Latin for low, of the earth.) You look at a flower and cannot help but glimpse the meaning of life.
Perhaps because the life of a garden is also a vivid reminder that anything of beauty and radiance takes time, takes care, takes devotion to seed and sprout and bloom, gardens have long been living cathedrals for the creative spirit.
Here, drawn from a lifetime of marginalia on great writers’ and artists’ letters and diaries, essays and novels, is a florilegium of my favorite exultations in the rewards and nourishments of gardens.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
In the spring of 1939, looking back on her life, Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) recounted her earliest memory — red and purple anemones printed on her mother’s black dress — and her most vivid childhood memory, also of a flower, in the garden by the large white house on the Celtic Sea coast where she grew up:
I was looking at the flower bed by the front door; “That is the whole”, I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower. It was a thought I put away as being likely to be very useful to me later.
All writers are unhappy. The picture of the world in books is thus too dark. The wordless are the happy: women in cottage gardens.
This was less a lament than a life-tested truth, for Woolf had found the most reliable salve for her own battle with the darkness in a cottage garden.
At the end of WWI, as the Spanish Flu pandemic was sweeping the world, Virginia and Leonard Woolf knew they had to leave London — their landlord had given them notice a year earlier. They went to the country, went to an auction, and purchased, for £700, Monk House — a sixteenth-century clapboard cottage without running water or electricity, but with a splendid acre of living land. Its story and its centrality to Woolf’s life and art comes alive in Virginia Woolf’s Garden (public library) by Caroline Zoob, who lived at Monk House and tended to its lush grounds for a decade.
Flowers by the Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister.
At first, Virginia Woolf approached gardening the way one approaches any new creative endeavor: with passionate curiosity and quavery confidence. She wanted to grow her own food, but was unsure what would thrive or how to tend to it; she wanted flowers, but was unsure what would bloom or how to start the seeds, so she planted some in soap boxes filled with soil, then wrote to a friend asking if this was the way. Within a couple of years, much thanks to Leonard’s increasingly ardent devotion to the garden, she was eating pears for breakfast and reporting that “every flower that grows booms here.”
At the peak of her first spring at Monk House, having worked in the garden past sunset on the unusually chilly last day of May, Virginia exulted in her diary:
The first pure joy of the garden… weeding all day to finish the beds in a queer sort of enthusiasm which made me say this is happiness.
Over the next few years, the garden became her great joy and solace; for Leonard, it became a life’s work and his great creative achievement. Just before the December holidays of 1925, during that most contemplative of seasons, she wrote in her diary:
I’ve had two very happy times in my life — childhood… and now. Now I have all I want. My garden — my dog.
Virginia Woolf at Monk House with her dog. (Photograph by Vita Sackville-West.)
For nine years at Monk House, she had been using the unheated garden toolshed as a writing studio. In 1928, the surprising success of Orlando — the art she made of her love for Vita Sackville-West, which Vita’s son later called “the longest and most charming love letter in literature” — rendered Virginia and Leonard solvent for the first time in their shared life. Now, with a half-disbelieving eye to a proper room of her own, she exulted in finally having “money to build it, money to furnish it.”
And build it she did, overlooking the garden, which she came to regard as nothing less than “a miracle.” She gazed out at the “vast white lilies, and such a blaze of dahlias” that, even on cold grey English days, “one feels lit up.”
After a particularly debilitating spell of her lifelong depression began lifting, she found her “defiance of death in the garden,” declaring in the diary: “I will signalise my return to life — that is writing — by beginning a new book.”
But it seems to me that it was only after a guided tour of Shakespeare’s house one May day in her early fifties that Virginia Woolf, in recognizing the role of the garden in his creative life, fully allowed herself to recognize its role in her own.
Marveling at the mulberry tree outside Shakespeare’s window and the “cushions of blue, yellow, white flowers in the garden,” she wrote in her diary:
All the flowers were out in Shakespeare’s garden. “That was where his study windows looked out when he wrote The Tempest,” said the man… I cannot without more labour than my roadrunning mind can compass describe the queer impression of sunny impersonality. Yes, everything seemed to say, this was Shakespeare’s, had he sat and walked; but you won’t find me, not exactly in the flesh. He is serenely absent-present; both at once; radiating round one; yes; in the flowers, in the old hall, in the garden; but never to be pinned down… To think of writing The Tempest looking out on that garden: what a rage and storm of thought to have gone over any mind.
I find it not coincidental that Shakespeare haunts the conclusion of her exquisite reflection on the childhood memory of the flower-bed that revealed to her the meaning of art and the meaning of life, inspiring her most direct formulation of a personal philosophy:
It is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
EMILY DICKINSON
“If we love Flowers, are we not ‘born again’ every Day,” Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) wrote to a friend just before her springtime death at fifty-five. When her coffin was carried across the field of buttercups to the nearby cemetery, as she had requested, most of the townspeople awaiting it knew the enigmatic woman with the auburn hair as a gardener rather than a poet. Her first formal act of composition as a girl had been not a poem but an herbarium, and only four of her nearly two thousand surviving poems had been published in her lifetime, all sidewise to her overt consent. Susan — the great love of Emily’s life, to whom she had written her electric love letters and dedicated most of her poems — listed her “Love of flowers” as the foremost attribute of the poet who often signed herself as “Daisy.”
But make no mistake — the garden was the true laboratory for Emily Dickinson’s art, and in that art flowers figured as her richest symbolic language. She might have written her poems on the seventeen and a half square inches of her cherrywood writing desk upstairs in the sunlit bedroom facing West, but all creative work comes abloom first in the mind — the rest is mere transcription — and her mind was most sunlit among her flowers. It was there, too, that she beamed her penetrating intellect at the invisible interleaving of the universe and came to see, a year before Ernst Haeckel coined the term ecology, how every single flower is a microcosm of complex ecological relationships between numerous organisms and their environment.
Emily Dickinson captured this understanding in a spare, stunning 1865 poem, in which the flower emerges not as the pretty object of admiration to which the conventions of Victorian poetry had confined it but as a ravishing system of aliveness — a silent symphony of interconnected resilience, which the flower-loving one-woman orchestra Joan As Police Woman set to song for the opening installment in the animated season of The Universe in Verse, with art by Ohara Hale based on Emily Dickinson’s herbarium and lettering by Debbie Millman based on Emily Dickinson’s handwriting:
BLOOM by Emily Dickinson
Bloom — is Result — to meet a Flower
And casually glance
Would cause one scarcely to suspect
The minor Circumstance
Assisting in the Bright Affair
So intricately done
Then offered as a Butterfly
To the Meridian —
To pack the Bud — oppose the Worm —
Obtain its right of Dew —
Adjust the Heat — elude the Wind —
Escape the prowling Bee
Great Nature not to disappoint
Awaiting Her that Day —
To be a Flower, is profound
Responsibility —
DEBBIE MILLMAN
A century after Virginia and Leonard Woolf started their Monk House garden amid the Spanish Flu pandemic, Debbie Millman — my longtime former partner and now darling friend — and her wife Roxane undertook a kindred act of resistance to despair as the deadliest pandemic of our own century was furling humanity into fetal position. Watching their small garden grow into a blooming emblem of aliveness, Debbie composed an illustrated love letter to its unexpected gifts, to the way it bridged the seasonal and the cosmic, the transient and the eternal, to its blooming, buzzing affirmation of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetic-existential observation that “wherever life can grow… it will sprout out, and do the best it can.”
Looking back on the record of his experiment, he observes:
Patterns and themes and concerns show up… My mother is often on my mind. Racism is often on my mind. Kindness is often on my mind. Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind.
The garden indeed proves to be his readiest source of daily delight — a living reminder that spontaneity, unpredictability, and the occasional gladsome interruption of our habitual consciousness are essential components of delight. In an early-August entry titled “Inefficiency,” he writes:
I don’t know if it’s the time I’ve spent in the garden (spent an interesting word), which is somehow an exercise in supreme attentiveness — staring into the oregano blooms wending through the lowest branches of the goumi bush and the big vascular leaves of the rhubarb — and also an exercise in supreme inattention, or distraction, I should say, or fleeting intense attentions, I should say, or intense fleeting attentions — did I mention the hummingbird hovering there with its green-gold breast shimmering, slipping its needle nose in the zinnia, and zoom! Mention the pokeweed berries dangling like jewelry from a flapper mid-step. Mention the little black jewels of deer scat and the deer-shaped depressions in the grass and red clover. Uh oh.
This wildly delightful tone, fusing the miraculous and the mischievous, carries the book:
When people say they have a black thumb, meaning they can’t grow anything, I say yeah, me too, then talk about the abundant garden these black thumbs are growing.
Inevitably, Gay — like every gardener — arrives at the spiritual aspect of this earthliest and earthiest of the arts:
A lily was the first flower I planted in my garden, and I pray to it daily in the four to six weeks that it offers up its pinkish speckling by getting on my knees and pushing my face in, which, yes, is also a kind of kissing, as I tend to pucker my lips and close my eyes, and if you get close enough you’d probably hear some minute slurping between us, and for some reason I wish to deploy the verb drowning, which, in addition to being a cliché, implies a particular kind of death, and I will follow the current of that verb to suggest that the flower kissing, the moving so close to another living and breathing thing’s breath, which in this case is that of the lily I planted six years ago, will in fact kill you with delight, will annihilate you with delight, will end the life you had previously led before kneeling here and breathing the breathing thing’s breath, and the lily will resurrect you, too, your lips and nose lit with gold dust, your face and fingers smelling faintly all day of where they’ve been, amen.
I plan my garden as I wish I could plan my life, with islands of surprise, color, and scent. A seductive aspect of gardening is how many rituals it requires… By definition, the gardener’s errands can never be finished, and its time-keeping reminds us of an order older and one more complete than our own. For the worldwide regiment of gardeners, reveille sounds in spring, and rom then on it’s full parade march, pomp and circumstance, and ritualized tending until winter. But even then there’s much to admire and learn about in the garden.
Considering the existential universals that pulsate beneath the particulars of any category of creative expression, she adds:
Gardeners have unique preferences, which tend to reflect dramas in their personal lives, but they all share a love of natural beauty and a passion to create order, however briefly, from chaos. The garden becomes a frame or their vision of life… Nurturing, decisive, interfering, cajoling, gardeners are extreme optimists who trust the ways of nature and believe passionately in the idea of improvement. As the gnarled, twisted branches of apple trees have taught them, beauty can spring in the most unlikely places. Patience, hard work, and a clever plan usually lead to success: private worlds of color, scent, and astonishing beauty. Small wonder a gardener plans her garden as she wishes she could plan her life.
ROBIN WALL KIMMERER
The preeminent bryologistRobin Wall Kimmerer has devoted her life and her lyrical prose to contemplating our relationship with the rest of nature. In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (public library), she bridges her scientific training with her Native heritage to explore “the equations of reciprocity and responsibility, the whys and wherefores of building sustainable relationships with ecosystems” — questions rendered most intimate and alive in the garden.
In a splendid antidote to the four-century delusion of dualism Descartes cast upon us, Kimmerer writes:
A garden is a way that the land says, “I love you.” … Gardens are simultaneously a material and a spiritual undertaking.
Illustration by Carson Ellis from What Is Love? by Mac Barnett
Half a century after the protagonist of Willa Cather’s novel My Antonia exclaimed while lying on his back in his grandmother’s garden that to find happiness is “to be dissolved into something complete and great,” Kimmerer reflects:
It came to me while picking beans, the secret of happiness.
I was hunting among the spiraling vines that envelop my teepees of pole beans, lifting the dark-green leaves to find handfuls of pods, long and green, firm and furred with tender fuzz. I snapped them off where they hung in slender twosomes, bit into one, and tasted nothing but August, distilled into pure, crisp beaniness… By the time I finished searching through just one trellis, my basket was full. To go and empty it in the kitchen, I stepped between heavy squash vines and around tomato plants fallen under the weight of their fruit. They sprawled at the feet of the sunflowers, whose heads bowed with the weight of maturing seeds.
As she ambles past the potato patch her daughters had left off harvesting that morning, Kimmerer considers the parallels between parenting and gardening in what it means to care for, to steward, to love — whether the particular piece of nature that is every child and every living thing, or the totality of nature. Drawing on the ways she shows her daughters love — making them maple syrup in March, bringing them wild strawberries in June, watching the meteor showers together in August — she finds a mirror-image in the way nature loves us:
How do we show our children our love? Each in our own way by a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons.
Maybe it was the smell of ripe tomatoes, or the oriole singing, or that certain slant of light on a yellow afternoon and the beans hanging thick around me. It just came to me in a wash of happiness that made me laugh out loud, startling the chickadees who were picking at the sunflowers, raining black and white hulls on the ground. I knew it with a certainty as warm and clear as the September sunshine. The land loves us back. She loves us with beans and tomatoes, with roasting ears and blackberries and birdsongs. By a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons. She provides for us and teaches us to provide for ourselves. That’s what good mothers do.
I am reminded here of how the English language, unlike my native Bulgarian, pays homage to this parallel between parenting and planting in its lexicon: nursery is the word for both the place where we nurture our young as they start their lives and the place where we start our gardens. Kimmerer captures this parent-like responsibility to the life of the land, to the mutuality of care:
In a garden, food arises from partnership. If I don’t pick rocks and pull weeds, I’m not fulfilling my end of the bargain. I can do these things with my handy opposable thumb and capacity to use tools, to shovel manure. But I can no more create a tomato or embroider a trellis in beans than I can turn lead into gold. That is the plants’ responsibility and their gift: animating the inanimate. Now there is a gift.
People often ask me what one thing I would recommend to restore relationship between land and people. My answer is almost always, “Plant a garden.” It’s good for the health of the earth and it’s good for the health of people. A garden is a nursery for nurturing connection, the soil for cultivation of practical reverence. And its power goes far beyond the garden gate — once you develop a relationship with a little patch of earth, it becomes a seed itself.
The garden is a place of many sacraments, an arena — at once as common as any room and as special as a church — where we can go not just to witness but to enact in a ritual way our abiding ties to the natural world. Abiding, yet by now badly attenuated, for civilization seems bent on breaking or at least forgetting our connections to the earth. But in the garden the old bonds are preserved, and not merely as symbols. So we eat from the vegetable patch, and, if we’re paying attention, we’re recalled to our dependence on the sun and the rain and the everyday leaf-by-leaf alchemy we call photosynthesis. Likewise, the poultice of comfrey leaves that lifts a wasp’s sting from our skin returns us to a quasi-magic world of healing plants from which modern medicine would cast us out.
Such sacraments are so benign that few of us have any trouble embracing them, even if they do sound a faintly pagan note. I’d guess that’s because we’re generally willing to be reminded that our bodies, at least, remain linked in such ways to the world of plants and animals, to nature’s cycles.
REBECCA SOLNIT
“If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it,” Rebecca Solnit writes in Orwell’s Roses (public library) — the unsynthesizably wonderful story of the rose garden the thirty-three-year-old George Orwell planted at the small sixteenth-century cottage his suffragist aunt had secured for him as he contemplated enlisting in the Spanish Civil War.
Solnit observes that the garden, paradoxically, both feeds and counterbalances the art that is both her life’s work and Orwell’s:
A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. It’s vivid to all the senses, it’s a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect.
[…]
To spend time frequently with these direct experiences is clarifying, a way of stepping out of the whirlpools of words and the confusion they can whip up. In an age of lies and illusions, the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time, the rules of physics, meteorology, hydrology, and biology, and the realms of the senses.
In this place of paradoxes and pleasing tensions — control and chaos, transience and durability, planning and surprise — none is more pleasing than the garden’s dual reminder that we are insignificant particles in vast a cosmos of process and phenomena, and we are potent seeds of change, our littlest actions rippling out into the evolutionary unfolding of the whole. Solnit captures this with her signature pointed poetics:
To garden is to make whole again what has been shattered: the relationships in which you are both producer and consumer, in which you reap the bounty of the earth directly, in which you understand fully how something came into being. It may not be significant in scale, but even if it’s a windowsill geranium high above a city street, it can be significant in meaning.
DEREK JARMAN
In 1989, shortly after his HIV diagnosis and his father’s death, the English artist, filmmaker, and LGBT rights activist Derek Jarman (January 31, 1942–February 19, 1994) left the bustling pretensions of London for a simple life on the shingled shores of Kent. He took up residence in a former Victorian fisherman’s hut between an old lighthouse and a nuclear power plant on the headland of Dungeness, a newly designated a conservation area. He named it Prospect Cottage, painted the front room a translucent Naples yellow, replaced the ramshackle door with blue velvet curtains, and set about making a garden around the gnarled century-old pear tree rising from the carpet of violets as the larks living in the shingles sang high above him in the grey-blue English sky.
At low tide, he collected some handsome sea-rounded flints washed up after a storm, staked them upright in the garden “like dragon teeth,” and encircled each with twelve small beach pebbles. These rudimentary sundials became his flower beds, into which he planted a wondrous miniature wilderness of species not even half of which I, a growing gardener, have encountered — saxifrage, calendula, rue, camomile, shirley poppy, santolina, nasturtium, dianthus, purple iris, hare-bell, and his favorite: sea kale. (A gorgeous plant new to me, which I immediately researched, procured, and planted in my Brooklyn garden.)
As the seasons turned and his flowers rose and the AIDS plague felled his friends one by one, Jarman mourned loss after loss, then grounded himself again and again in the irrepressible life of soil and sprout and bud and bloom. The garden, which his Victorian ancestors saw as a source of moral lessons, became his sanctuary of “extraordinary peacefulness” amid the deepest existential perturbations of death, his canvas for creation amid all the destruction. On the windblown shore, living with a deadly disease while his friends — his kind, our kind — are dying of it in a world too indifferent to human suffering, gardening became his act of resistance as he set out to build an alternative garden of Eden:
Before I finish I intend to celebrate our corner of Paradise, the part of the garden the Lord forgot to mention.
The record of this healing creative adventure became Jarman’s Modern Nature (public library) — part memoir and part memorial, a reckoning and a redemption, a homecoming to his first great love: gardening. What emerges from the short near-daily entries is a kind of hybrid between Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom, Rilke’s Book of Hours, and Thoreau’s philosophical nature journals.
On the last day of February, after planting lavender in a circle of stones he collected from the beach under the clear blue sky, he writes:
Apart from the nagging past — film, sex and London — I have never been happier than last week. I look up and see the deep azure sea outside my window in the February sun, and today I saw my first bumble bee. Plated lavender and clumps of red hot poker.
Iris from A Curious Herbal by Elizabeth Blackwell, 1737. (Available as a print, benefitting the Nature Conservancy.)
In the first week of March, Jarman arrives at what may be the greatest reward of gardening:
The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time — the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.
In the essay on Jarman, titled “Paradise,” she twines the questions of whether gardening is a form of art and whether art is a form of resistance — a necessary tool for building the Garden of Eden we imagine a flourishing society to be:
Gardening situates you in a different kind of time, the antithesis of the agitating present of social media. Time becomes circular, not chronological; minutes stretch into hours; some actions don’t bear fruit for decades. The gardener is not immune to attrition and loss, but is daily confronted by the ongoing good news of fecundity. A peony returns, alien pink shoots thrusting from bare soil. The fennel self-seeds; there is an abundance of cosmos out of nowhere.
[…]
Is art resistance? Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises.
A century and a half after Walt Whitman extolled the healing powers of nature after his paralytic stroke, the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) gave empirical substantiation to these unparalleled powers.
As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit. The importance of these physiological states on individual and community health is fundamental and wide-ranging. In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical “therapy” to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.
Having lived and worked in New York City for half a century — a city “sometimes made bearable… only by its gardens” — Sacks recounts witnessing nature’s tonic effects on his neurologically impaired patients: A man with Tourette’s syndrome, afflicted by severe verbal and gestural tics in the urban environment, grows completely symptom-free while hiking in the desert; an elderly woman with Parkinson’s disease, who often finds herself frozen elsewhere, can not only easily initiate movement in the garden but takes to climbing up and down the rocks unaided; several people with advanced dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, who can’t recall how to perform basic operations of civilization like tying their shoes, suddenly know exactly what to do when handed seedlings and placed before a flower bed. Sacks reflects:
I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication… The effects of nature’s qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and neurological. I have no doubt that they reflect deep changes in the brain’s physiology, and perhaps even its structure.
BRONSON ALCOTT
“I had a pleasant time with my mind, for it was happy,” Louisa May Alcott wrote in her diary just after she turned eleven, a quarter century before Little Women bloomed from that uncommon mind — a mind whose pleasures and powers were nurtured by the profound love of nature her father wove into the philosophical and scientific education he gave his four daughters.
The progressive philosopher, abolitionist, education reformer, and women’s rights advocate Bronson Alcott (November 29, 1799–March 4, 1888) developed his ideas about human flourishing and social harmony by observing and reflecting on the processes, phenomena, and pleasures of the natural world — something he shared with the Transcendentalists of his generation, and particularly with his best friend: the naturalistic transcendence-shaman Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In 1856, while living next door to the visionary Elizabeth Peabody in Boston — the seedbed of Transcendentalism, a term Peabody herself had coined — Alcott borrowed and devoured Emerson’s copy of a book sent to him by an obscure young Brooklyn poet as a token of gratitude for having inspired it: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, published months earlier.
Hot pepper from Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Whitman’s unexampled verse — so free from the Puritanical conventions of poetry, so lush with a love of life, so unabashedly reverent of nature as the only divinity — stirred a deep resonance with Bronson’s own worldview and inspired him to try his hand at the portable poetics of nature: gardening. Right there in the middle of bustling Boston, where his young country was just beginning to find its intellectual and artistic voice, Alcott set up his humble urban garden. One May morning — a century and a half before bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer contemplated gardening and the secret of happiness, before Olivia Laing wrote of gardening as an act of resistance, before neurologist Oliver Sacks drew on forty years of medical practice to attest to the healing power of gardens — the fifty-six-year-old Alcott planted some peas, corn, cucumbers, and melons, then wrote in his journal:
Human life is a very simple matter. Breath, bread, health, a hearthstone, a fountain, fruits, a few garden seeds and room to plant them in, a wife and children, a friend or two of either sex, conversation, neighbours, and a task life-long given from within — these are contentment and a great estate. On these gifts follow all others, all graces dance attendance, all beauties, beatitudes, mortals can desire and know.
By mid-summer, Alcott had discovered in his garden not only a creaturely gladness but a portal into the deepest existential contentment — something akin to the creative intoxication that he, like all artists, found in his literary calling:
My garden has been my pleasure, and a daily recreation since the spring opened for planting… Every plant one tends he falls in love with, and gets the glad response for all his attentions and pains. Books, persons even, are for the time set aside — studies and the pen. — Only persons of perennial genius attract or recreate as the plants, and of books we may say the same, as of the magic of solitude.
JAMAICA KINCAID
A chief gladness of gardening comes from its dual nature, from how it salves our longing for making order out of chaos but also frustrates it. There is elemental satisfaction in the reminder that we can never fully control nature — that, in fact, any sense of control is a childish fantasy, for we ourselves are children of nature, made by the selfsame forces and phenomena we play at bridling.
That is what the writer and gardener Jamaica Kincaid celebrates in My Garden (Book) (public library) — a fractal delight I discovered via Ross Gay, who devotes to it a midsummer entry in his yearlong journal of daily delights. (All delight is fractal.)
Writing in the first year of the twenty-first century, in a passage evocative of the poetic physicist Richard Feynman’s insistence that “nature has the greatest imagination of all,” Kincaid reflects:
How agitated I am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so agitated. How vexed I often am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so vexed. What to do? Nothing works just the way I thought it would, nothing looks just the way I had imagined it, and when sometimes it does look like what I had imagined (and this, thank God, is rare) I am startled that my imagination is so ordinary.
What to do? becomes the recurring incantation of the garden’s imagination. Puzzled by why her Wisteria floribunda is blooming out of season and reason, in late July rather than in May, Kincaid wonders:
What to do with the wisteria? should I let it go, blooming and blooming, each new bud looking authoritative but also not quite right at all, as if on a dare, a surprise even to itself, looking as if its out-of-seasonness was a modest, tentative query?
[…]
My garden has no serious intention, my garden has only series of doubts upon series of doubts.
This, of course, is the definition of the scientific method — the vector of revelation as a series of doubts and tentative queries continually tested against reality. But there is also a spiritual dimension to Kincaid’s questioning refrain, to the longing for an answer from an external entity with higher powers of omniscience — this, of course, is the definition of religion. In her gasping wonderment, she arrives at something beyond reason and beyond belief — the single animating force beneath all science and all spirituality:
What to do? Whom should I ask what to do? Is there a person to whom I could ask such a question and would that person have an answer that would make sense to me in a rational way (in the way even I have come to accept things as rational), and would that person be able to make the rational way imbued with awe and not so much with the practical; I know the practical, it will keep you breathing; awe, on the other hand, is what makes you (me) want to keep living.
A two-wheel romp through the topography of progress from Victorian times to rural Spain to twentieth-century America.
By Maria Popova
“You are at all times independent. This absolute freedom of the cyclist can be known only to the initiated,” Maria Ward wrote in her blazing 1896 manifesto Bicycling for Ladies, celebrating the bicycle as an instrument of emancipation, self-reliance, and unselfconscious joy a year after the New York World published its tragicomical list of don’ts for women on two wheels.
These might seem like amusing specimens from the fossil record of culture, but they encode the broader and darker history of regulating women’s sovereignty of sinew and spirit — our autonomy of over our own bodies: how we move them through the world and how the world moves through them. Today, with neuroscience finally affirming what the poets and philosophers have long known — that consciousness is a full-body phenomenon, or as Walt Whitman memorably put it in Maria Ward’s time, that the body is the soul — it is more plainly evident than ever that regulatory control of the body is a bid for control of the mind, of the soul, of consciousness itself.
Anchored in three historical artifacts — this “map of woman’s heart” from the first half of the nineteenth century, satirizing Victorian gender stereotypes; the aforementioned list of don’ts for women on bicycles from the end of the nineteenth century, which includes dicta like “don’t faint on the road,”“don’t scream if you meet a cow,” and “don’t try to ride in your brother’s clothes to see how it feels”; and these rules of conduct for women, pinned on the door of a Spanish church in the 1960s, which decree that “no decent woman or girl is ever seen on a bicycle” — the piece then time-travels to “the land of the free,” synthesizing some of the legally sanctioned don’ts for American women in the 1970s: no credit cards, no Ivy League education, no protection from sexual harassment in the workplace, no legal access to birth control.
Punctuating the incantations of what women may not do is the sudden, striking, almost ironic chorus line:
You may ride a bike!
No… no… must comply with your husband.
You may ride a bike!
No… no… must comply with your husband.
You may ride a bike!
No… no… no… no… no… no… no… no…
Suddenly, the piece becomes a sort of cultural elegy, in the classic sense of celebration and lamentation fused into one, reminding us just how long the arc of progress is, how much of what we take for granted today is the hard-won victory of generations past (as I realized afresh, having ridden my bicycle to the nineteenth-century fishery turned event space where the young people sang), and how, as Zadie Smith observed in her electrifying meditation on optimism and despair, “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.”
Complement with “Thrush Song” — the haunting choral tribute to Rachel Carson, on which Paola and I collaborated for the 2020 Universe in Verse, brought to life by another constellation of young voices — then revisit the trailblazing life and art of Alice Austen, who mounted fifty pounds of photography equipment on her bicycle to become a pioneer of street photography and the nineteenth century’s foremost documentarian of queer culture.
The Marginalian participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from any link on here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)
ABOUT
CONTACT
SUPPORT
SUBSCRIBE
Newsletter
RSS
CONNECT
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Tumblr