The Reading of Serendipity

When much of your reading is purpose-driven, other reading tends to be more for pure pleasure. In my case, I frequently find myself engrossed in a book which surprises me by its lack of connection to what I normally would choose. In this case, my son had given me a book entitled Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition by Robert Pogue Harrison. This in turn led me to a book I saw mentioned by Harrison called The Gardener's Year by Karel Capek. Capek, a Czech intellectual and statesman, was a strong dissident voice during the rise of National Socialism in Europe in years leading up to World War II. He died in 1938.

 Capek's passion in this book is soil, the medium with which gardener's work. As Verlyn Klinkenborg who writes the introduction to the Modern Library Gardening Edition writes, "The question of garden soil is ultimately a moral one for him. Some soils are beautiful in richness and consistency while others are 'ugly as the coldness, callousness, and malice of human souls.'" In The Gardener's Year, Capek undertakes to use the motif of gardening as providing commentary on the world around him. Gardening is essentially a moral exercise and the true gardener, although frequently appearing as a slightly ridiculous figure, is involved in deadly serious work. It becomes a metaphor for the role of the intellectual. His image of the true gardener is expressed in terms of the one who tends the soil. Here's Capek:

"While I was only a remote and distracted onlooker of the accomplished work of gardens, I considered gardeners to be beings of a peculiarly poetic and gentle mind, who cultivate perfumes of flowers listening to the birds singing. Now when I look at the affair more closely, I find that a real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil. He is a creature who digs himself into the earth, and leaves the sight of what is on it to us gaping good-for-nothings. He lives buried in the ground. He builds his monument in a heap of compost. If he came into the Garden of Eden he would sniff excitedly and say: 'Good Lord, what humus!' I think that he would forget to eat fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; he would rather look round to see how he could manage to take away from the Lord some barrow loads of of the paradisiac soil. Or he would discover that the tree of knowledge of good and evil has not round it a nice dishlike bed, and he would begin to mess about with the soil, innocent of what is hanging over his head. 'Where are you, Adam?' the Lord would say. 'In a moment,' the gardener would shout over his shoulder; 'I am busy now.' And he would go on making his little bed." Or, as he says a little farther on: "...The gardener is not a man who smells a rose, but who is persecuted by the idea that 'the soil would like some lime,' or that it is heavy (as lead the gardener says), and 'would like some sand.'"

In the next few posts, I'll highlight some of Capek's other insights gleaned from this little treasure.