Gardens
The human psyche has always kept a garden, tucked away in a corner where memory and imagination intersect. There are different gardens, and each have their own qualities.
Eden is one such garden. Humans become civilized through an endless, weary struggle to dominate nature, to bend and reshape it to feed our ravenous, ever-expanding appetites. The weary ploughman imagines a life lived in harmony with the natural world, one in which its gifts are accepted rather than plundered. That is Eden.
Eden is one such garden. Humans become civilized through an endless, weary struggle to dominate nature, to bend and reshape it to feed our ravenous, ever-expanding appetites. The weary ploughman imagines a life lived in harmony with the natural world, one in which its gifts are accepted rather than plundered. That is Eden.
Arcadia is another such garden. Ancient city-dwelling Greeks had heard of the place, a generous and inaccessible pastureland high in the mountains. Pan was the God of the place and the herdsmen who lived simply there, playing pipes to pacify restless sheep. Theocritus developed a poetry that sought to lead listeners to such bucolic pleasures; Virgil renewed the Arcadian dream in his Eclogues. Two millennia later, so did Renaissance courtiers – besotted with the rediscovery of Greek poetry and weary of their own court intrigues, no doubt.
And there is the Garden of the Hesperides. At the western edge of the world, on an island where the sun is perpetually setting, a garden is tended by the daughters of Evening, the nymphs of the West. In that garden is a tree that bears golden apples. The apples grant immortality if eaten, discord if sought. The garden is thus the last opportunity for renewed life before night sets in.
The nymphs have their own genealogies, and the ancient Greeks could locate the garden of the Hesperides on a map (somewhere near the Atlas mountains of North Africa, near the earth-encircling waters of Oceanus).
The nymphs have their own genealogies, and the ancient Greeks could locate the garden of the Hesperides on a map (somewhere near the Atlas mountains of North Africa, near the earth-encircling waters of Oceanus).
These gardens know of mortality. Eden harbors its strange talking serpent, who truthfully steers Eve to knowledge (only forgetting to tell her of the death that will follow, punishment of a deity that knows knowledge + immortality = Godhood).
And the Shepherds of Arcadia know death, of course. “Et in Arcadio Ego,” they read, inscribed on a tomb. “I, too, dwell in Arcadia.”
And round the tree of golden apples curls the dragon Ladon, keeping its fruit beyond the reach of questing mortals. (Until he’s killed by the blundering tool Herakles, who duly takes his place among the immortal gods).
It is this last garden, the Hesperidean one, that seems best suited to my purpose and the times. Late romantics have that keen apprehension of night approaching, and it makes the sunset all the more splendid.