rosieannabelle333's Reviews (104)

The apple of knowledge had been plucked, and maybe the knowledge was sexuality, or maybe it was the knowledge of how cruel the policing of sexuality can be. Either way, the garden gates were barred.

Many people have lost a paradise, and even if they haven’t the story of the lost paradise continues to resonate because nearly all of us have lost or relinquished or else forgotten the paradise of a child’s perception, when the world is so new and generous in its astonishments, let alone the sweet, fruitful paradise of first love, when the body itself becomes the garden. Perhaps this is why literature is so crammed with secular versions of the Eden story: gardens that open unexpectedly and are then locked, a paradise that is stumbled upon and can never be found again

Adam and Eve mourn their losses, grieve what won’t continue, but when the eviction comes, when the cherubim gather like mist rising from a river, when they are taken by the hand and led to Eden’s gate, they look back, drop a tear, and then turn resolutely around. The final lines swell with possibility. ‘The World was all before them.’ Whatever they have suffered, whatever damage has been done, the future lies open ahead.

Eden is a place of infinite abundance and possibility, where someone else owns the land, where adventurers plunder and dispossess, where labour is ordained and never-ending, where there are bosses and enforcers, where eviction is an omnipresent threat and at the last a tragic reality. 
It sounds a lot like Earth.

Is it love? Is it sex? Is it a new social order? What is the endlessly renewable Edenic cargo of which Morris dreams? I think what his gardens really stand for is fellowship: a humming, thrumming togetherness that transcends not only sexual desire but the human world itself. Call it a garden state: a cross-species ecology of astounding beauty and completeness, never static, always in motion, progressive and prolific. I want to live there, and the world won’t survive much longer if we don’t. It hasn’t come to pass, this fertile revolution, and yet every time you look into a garden, the invitation is still there.

The city’s chimney pots behind and the plants in front, each occupying their own distinctive time frame, so that what seems most transient is also closest to eternal. What was the lovely line from Cymbeline? ‘Golden lads and girls all must, as chimneysweepers, come to dust.’ Golden lads is said to be a nickname for dandelions and chimneysweepers their seed heads, though plainly not in Shakespeare’s day, when the chimney brush they resemble hadn’t yet been invented. Hodgkin had included both here, spelling out in the language of flowers a constant cycle of decay, regeneration and return, in which we all play a part.

War is the opposite of a garden, the antithesis of a garden, its furthest extremity in terms of human nature and human endeavour. It is possible that a garden will emerge from a bombsite, but it is certain that a bomb will destroy a garden.

To accept the presence of death in the garden is not to accept the forced march of climate change. It is to refuse an illusion of perpetual productivity, without rest or repair: an illusion purchased at a heavy, soon unpayable cost, inaugurating a summer without end, the fields burning, the trees like stones.

I could see that the skin of dead leaves and sticks under the hazel had its own loveliness, protecting the soil from drying out, nourishing microbial activity, feeding the new green snouts of the day lilies. Death generating life, evidence of our fallen state. Maybe that was better than paradise.

“Structural reforms were as inevitable as the weather. They were adopted everywhere in the same form, because the past had failed, and we had never learned how to shape the future. There was no politics left, only policy.”

“I waved goodbye to my father and my grandmother on the shore and travelled to Italy on a boat that sailed over thousands of drowned bodies, bodies that had once carried souls more hopeful than mine, but who met fates less fortunate. I never returned.”

“Freedom is not sacrificed only when others tell us what to say, where to go, how to behave. A society that claims to enable people to realise their potential, but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing, is also oppressive. And yet, despite all the constraints, we never lose our inner freedom: the freedom to do what is right.”

“My world is as far from freedom as the one my parents tried to escape. Both fall short of that ideal. But their failures took distinctive forms, and without being able to understand them, we will remain for ever divided. I wrote my story to explain, to reconcile, and to continue the struggle.“