A Reader on Reading

OUR FIRST IMPULSE IS TO decipher what we sense around us, as if everything in the universe carried meaning. We try to decode not only systems of signs created for that purpose — such as alphabets, hieroglyphs, pictographs, social gestures — but also the objects that surround us, the faces of others and our own reflection, the landscape through which we move, the shapes of clouds and trees, the changes in the weather, the flight of birds, the spoor of insects. Legend has it that cuneiform script, one of the earliest systems of writing we know, was invented by copying the footprints of sparrows in the mud of the Euphrates five thousand years ago, prints which must have seemed to our remote ancestors less casual markings than words in a mysterious and divine language. We lend moods to the seasons, significance to geographic settings, symbolic value to animals. Whether as trackers, poets, or shamans, we have intuited in the unfolding of nature an endless book in which we, like all other things, are written, but which we are also compelled to read.

If nature is a book, it is an infinite book, at least as vast as the universe itself. A garden then, is a scaled-down version of that universe, a comprehensible model of that endless text, glossed according to our restricted capabilities. According to the Midrash, God put man in the Garden of Eden “to dress it and to keep it,” but “that only means he is to study the Torah there and fulfill the commandments of God.” Expulsion from the Garden can be understood as a punishment for willfully incorrect reading.

Gardening and reading have a long association. In 1250, the chancellor of the cathedral of Amiens, Richard de Fournival, imagined a book-cataloguing system based on a horticultural model. He compared his library to an orchard wherein his fellow citizens might gather “the fruits of knowledge” and di vided it into three flowerbeds corresponding to three major categories: philosophy, the so-called lucrative sciences, and theology. Each bed in turn was divided into a number of smaller plots (areolae) containing a summary of the book’s subject matter. Fournival speaks of “cultivating” both his garden and his library.

Not surprisingly, the verb cultiver retains in French these two meanings: that of growing a garden and that of becoming learned. The tending of one’s garden and the tending of one’s books require, in the sense of the word cultiver, equal devotion, patience, persistence, and a serviceable sense of order. Cultiver is to seek the truth hidden in the apparent chaos of nature or a library, and to render visible its attendant qualities. Furthermore, in both cases, truth is subject to review. Gardener and reader must both be willing to shift purpose according to the exterior or interior weather, to yield to the consequences of new discoveries, to reorganize, redistribute, reconsider, redefine, according not to overwhelming absolutist notions but to individual and quotidian experience.

To a certain extent, the French Revolution is the consequence of a loss of confidence in absolutes. Rather than maintain that universal metaphysical categories rule human lives, or that ideas override experience, or that figures of divine power have the right to rule over individuals, the philosophers of the French Enlightenment preferred to argue what Immanuel Kant was later to call “the categorical imperative”: that every human act, at its finest, should in principle become a universal law. A splendid, if impossible, achievement, concerning which a century later Robert Louis Stevenson would note: “Our duty in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in the best of spirits.”

Voltaire would have agreed. Voltaire, above all the philosophers of the Enlightenment, wished us to act as if we, and not a Divine Commander, were accountable for the consequences of our acts. For him no human action is independent of another. “All events are linked in the best of all possible worlds,” the philosopher Pangloss tells Candide at the end of his adventures. “Had you not lost all your sheep in the good land of Eldorado, you would not be here eating pistachios and candied lemons.” To which Candide wisely answers, “Well said, but we must tend to our garden.”