2016.6.25 1980年代英國電視幽默劇《Yes Minister》此刻被翻炒，正好讓大家回顧一下英國外交政策，作為註腳。 Mark Twain — 'Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.'
Yes, Prime Minister 這是Hans 20幾年前在香港買的書。 讀一篇，就覺得應該讀完它，才算最起碼的了解英國人士。
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M
Who reads the papers? - Yes, Prime Minister - BBC comedy
Hacker: After 500 years has Britain's policy on Europe changed? Sir Humphrey: Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it's worked so well?
Hacker: That's all ancient history, surely? Sir Humphrey: Yes, and current policy. We 'had' to break the whole thing [the EEC] up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn't work. Now that we're inside we can make a complete pig's breakfast of the whole thing: set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch... The Foreign Office is terribly pleased; it's just like old times.
Hacker: But surely we're all committed to the European ideal? Sir Humphrey: [chuckles] Really, Minister. Hacker: If not, why are we pushing for an increase in the membership? Sir Humphrey: Well, for the same reason. It's just like the United Nations, in fact; the more members it has, the more arguments it can stir up, the more futile and impotent it becomes.
Hacker: What appalling cynicism. Sir Humphrey: Yes... We call it diplomacy, Minister.
Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn's superb sitcom Yes, Prime Minister entered 10 Downing Street with Jim Hacker now Prime Minister of Britain, following a campaign to "Save the British Sausage." Whether tackling defense ("The Grand Design"), local government ("Power to the People"), or the National Education Service, all of Jim Hacker's bold plans for reform generally come to nothing, thanks to the machinations of Nigel Hawthorne's complacent Cabinet Secretary Sir Humphrey (Jeeves to Hacker's Wooster) who opposes any action of any sort on the part of the PM altogether. This is usually achieved by discreet horse-trading. In "One of Us," for instance, Hacker relents from implementing defense cuts when he is presented with the embarrassingly large bill he ran up in a vote-catching mission to rescue a stray dog on an army firing range. Only in "The Tangled Web," the final episode of series 2, does the PM at last turn the tables on Sir Humphrey. Paul Eddington is a joy as Hacker, whether in mock-Churchillian mode or visibly cowering whenever he is congratulated on a "courageous" idea. Jay and Lynn's script, meanwhile, is a dazzlingly Byzantine exercise in wordplay, wittily reflecting the verbiage-to-substance ratio of politics. Ironically, Yes, Prime Minister is an accurate depiction of practically all political eras except its own, the 1980s, when Thatcher successfully carried out a radical program regardless of harrumphing senior civil servants. --David Stubbs
Product Description
In an unlikely chain of events, Jim Hacker emerges as the most viable candidate for his party's next Prime Minister. Now that he gets his own car and driver, a nice house in London, a place in the country, endless publicity and a pension for life, what more does he want? Bernard: I think he wants to govern Britain. Sir Humphrey: Well, stop him, Bernard! Named one of the Top Ten TV programs of all time by the British Film Institute, this brilliantly observed comedy of manners pits the well-meaning Prime Minister Jim Hacker against the machinations of the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, in the ultimate political marriage of inconvenience. Paul Eddington (Good Neighbors) stars as Jim Hacker and Academy Award nominee Nigel Hawthorne (The Madness of King George) first drew wide notice in the role of Sir Humphrey Appleby.
Antony Jay, a Machiavelli Scholar and a Creator of ‘Yes Minister,’ Dies at 86
Antony Jay
Antony Jay, whose keen appreciation of Machiavelli and corporate behavior helped make the 1980s British television series “Yes Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister” instant classics of political satire, died on Aug. 21. He was 86.
His death was announced by a family spokesman, who did not state where Mr. Jay had died or the cause.
Mr. Jay, a producer at BBC Television and a writer for the satirical news program “That Was the Week That Was” in the 1960s, was a close student of complex organizations and the behavior of the people who ran them.
In his books “Management and Machiavelli: An Inquiry Into the Politics of Corporate Life” (1967) and “Corporation Man” (1972), he drew parallels between kings and business leaders; as a writer and producer of management training films for Video Arts, a company he founded with the comic actor John Cleese, he was practiced in mining corporate culture for comedic effect.
With Jonathan Lynn, a colleague at Video Arts, Mr. Jay decided to shine a bright light on the dark machinations of government and the relationship between public officials and civil servants, a strange codependency in which the nominally powerful ended up as putty in the hands of their ostensible inferiors.
In “Yes Minister,” which ran from 1980 to 1984, audiences delighted in the weekly predicaments faced by the Right Honorable James Hacker (Paul Eddington), the well-meaning head of the fictional Ministry for Administrative Affairs; his wily, smooth-talking permanent under secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne); and Sir Humphrey’s whipsawed private secretary, Bernard Woolley (Derek Fowlds).
In “Yes, Prime Minister,” the same cast returned, with Hacker elevated to prime minister. Both series were broadcast in the United States by PBS.
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Paul Eddington, left, and Nigel Hawthorne in the British TV series “Yes Minister,” which ran from 1980 to 1984.CreditBBC, via Everett Collection
The series addressed, Mr. Jay told The New York Times in 1988, “the great undiscussed subject of British politics,” which he defined as “the tension not of left and right, not of Conservative and Socialist, but of all civil servants and all ministers.”
Audiences enjoyed the scrupulously nonpartisan skewering of narcissistic politicians and obstructionist bureaucrats. Ministers, members of Parliament and civil servants laughed or squirmed, depending on the joke.
“I suppose you could say that the fun of the series comes from showing civil servants as politicians see them and politicians as civil servants see them,” Mr. Jay told The Guardian in 1986. “I can tell you without any doubt that if you showed politicians and civil servants as they see themselves, you would have the most boring series television ever encountered.”
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared “Yes Minister” her favorite program. “Its closely observed portrayal of what goes on in the corridors of power,” she told The Daily Telegraph, “has given me hours of pure joy.”
Antony Rupert Jay was born on April 20, 1930, in London. His father, Ernest, and his mother, the former Catherine Hay, were actors. He attended St. Paul’s School and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he earned a degree in classics and comparative philology in 1952.
After serving two years with the Royal Signal Corps, he joined the current affairs department of BBC Television, where he developed the current affairs program “Tonight.” He became editor of the program and head of the television talk features department.
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Antony Jay’s “Management and Machiavelli” (1967).CreditPrentice Hall Press
In 1957 he married Rosemary Watkins, who survives him, along with their four children: Michael, David, Ros and Kate.
Mr. Jay left the BBC in 1964 to become a freelance writer and producer. David Frost, with whom he worked on “That Was the Week That Was,” hired him as a writer for “The Frost Report,” and the two collaborated on a book, “To England With Love” (1967), a sendup of their countrymen published in the United States as “The English.”
He wrote the documentary “The Royal Family” to celebrate the investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales in 1969 and, with the director Edward Mirzoeff, wrote another royal documentary, “Elizabeth R.: A Year in the Life of the Queen” (1992), to mark the 40th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession. In 1988 he was made a bachelor knight of the realm.
In addition to “Management and Machiavelli,” which Forbes magazine called “among the most provocative and perceptive books ever written on the subject of management,” he wrote “Effective Presentation: The Communication of Ideas by Words and Visual Aids” (1970) and “The Householder’s Guide to Community Defense Against Bureaucratic Aggression” (1972).ading the main story
While writing on corporate culture and politics, Mr. Jay became interested in public choice, a branch of political theory that treats voters, politicians and civil servants as self-interested agents and analyzes their behavior accordingly. He was also influenced by the anthropological works of such writers as Robert Ardrey.
“I am fascinated by how organizations behave and how people behave in organizations,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2005. “During my own experiences I saw how an awful lot of animal behavior, particularly primate behavior, comes up in the modern corporation.” All of this fed directly into his scripts for “Yes Minister.”
Mr. Lynn joined Mr. Jay in writing “The Complete Yes Minister,” presented as the edited and annotated diaries of James Hacker. It was published in 1984, and a sequel, “Yes, Prime Minister,” appeared in 1986. The two later collaborated on a stage version of “Yes Prime Minister.” Directed by Mr. Lynn, it opened at the Chichester Festival Theater in 2010 and later transferred to the West End in London. Correction: August 31, 2016 An obituary on Tuesday about Antony Jay, a creator of the British television series “Yes Minister,” no comma is cq misstated the name of the fictional government agency depicted in that show. It was the Ministry of Administrative Affairs, not the Ministry of Administrative Public Affairs.
"To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”
“The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.”
“The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.”
"Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you it is irrevocable, do not believe them. The past, the present and future are but one moment in the sight of God. Time and space are merely accidental conditions of thought. The imagination can transcend them."
“The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?”
“If I got nothing from the house of the rich I would get something at the house of the poor. Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little always share.”
De Profundis (Latin: "from the depths") is a 50,000 word letter written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, to Lord Alfred Douglas, his lover. Wilde wrote the letter between January and March 1897; he was not allowed to send it, but took it with him uponrelease. In it he repudiates Lord Alfred for what Wilde finally sees as his arrogance and vanity; he had not forgotten Douglas's remark, when he was ill, "When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting." He also felt redemption and fulfillment in his ordeal, realizing that his hardship had filled the soul with the fruit of experience, however bitter it tasted at the time.
"Oscar Wilde: From the Depths" Now - February 14, 2016 Lantern Theater Company Philadelphia, PA
This new play pries open the imagination of Oscar Wilde, the most original and artistic mind of his generation. At the height of his literary success and incandescent celebrity he is brought to sudden and catastrophic ruin. Now, desolate and alone in his cell at Reading Gaol, he struggles to overcome the darkness that threatens to engulf him. Conjuring up a cast of characters from his memory, he revisits the stories from his meteoric career and unconventional personal life in search of transformation and salvation. More here:http://www.lanterntheater.org/2015-16/oscar-wilde.html
"We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." --from The Complete Works by Michel de Montaigne
Humanist, skeptic, acute observer of himself and others, Michel de Montaigne (1533—92) was the first to use the term “essay” to refer to the form he pioneered, and he has remained one of its most famous practitioners. He reflected on the great themes of existence in his wise and engaging writings, his subjects ranging from proper conversation and good reading, to the raising of children and the endurance of pain, from solitude, destiny, time, and custom, to truth, consciousness, and death. Having stood the test of time, his essays continue to influence writers nearly five hundred years later. READ more here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/116153/the-complete-works/
Pride encounters prejudice, upward-mobility confronts social disdain, and quick-wittedness challenges sagacity, as misconceptions and hasty judgments lead to heartache and scandal, but eventually to true understanding, self-knowledge, and love. In this supremely satisfying story, Jane Austen balance...
Light flares are seen at the Monument to the Defenders of Westerplatte, during a ceremony marking the 77th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War in Westerplatte, Gdansk, Poland on September 1st 2016. The first shots of the Second World War were fired at the Westerplatte fortifications by German Navy destroyer "Schleswig-Holstein" at 04:45am on September 1st 1939.
‘I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it’.
Charles Dickens started writing A Christmas Carol in September 1843. Explore the origins of this enduring tale http://bit.ly/2ctt6Yk
Jean Cocteau 一些資料 科克托的日記寫著：我先要做的是填製一張適合靈魂而非身體休憩的座椅。
Décor Inspiration from Surrealist Jean Cocteau An avowed maximalist finds affirmation in a visit to the super-eclectic home of surrealist Jean Cocteau an hour outside Paris
PreviousNext 1 of 17fullscreen The medieval town of Milly-la-Forêt, France, was home to Cocteau from 1947 until his death at 74, in 1963. FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STR The salon at Maison Cocteau, the house museum in Milly-la-Forêt, France, where the surrealist poet and director of 1946’s ‘La Belle ... The star-burst ornament over the fireplace was a gift from Coco Chanel.FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL A rass palm tree, including stylized coconuts, grace a window of the salon. FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL A gold-metal cast of Cocteau’s hands qualify as the “unexpected or ugly” element that friend and decorator Madeleine Castaing insisted every room include. FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Cheetah-print cotton envelopes Cocteau’s study. New York designer Harry Heissman, who similarly papered his tiny living room, said, ‘It adds an aura of inspiration and fantasy. It also masks the lack of a crown molding and enlarges a room.’ FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Personal bibelots on Coctaeu’s desk appear to include a harmonica. A collection of jazz records is among the artist’s belongings in the house.FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL A table and blackboard in his study illustrate Cocteau’s many métiers: poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, librettist, painter and film director.FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL The bed in Cocteau’s room was angled so that his view of the gardens he designed remained unobstructed by the foot board. FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL The mural is believed to be painted by Cocteau’s partner, Jean Marais, who bought the house with him. Marais starred as Beast in Cocteau’s ‘La Belle et la Bête,’ and appears in the bottom right corner of the mural.FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Drapes that have faded from red to a deep pink frame the view to the garden. Decorator Madeleine Castaing believed that framing windows in red complements and highlights the green of the outdoors. FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Furniture within Maison Cocteau was arranged for maximum appreciation of the gardens. FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL An allée of espaliered apple trees leads to the 17th-century former bailiff’s house an hour’s train ride from Paris. FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Just outside a courtyard door sits a sculpture of a sphinx that is half 18th-century woman. FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Cocteau painted frescos in the 17th-century Chapelle Saint-Blaise-des-Simples, also in Milly la Forêt, as part of its restoration in the 1950s. He is buried there. FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL The frescos, which Cocteau called tattoos, were based upon the theme of Christ’s resurrection. The artist is buried here with his later partner, Edouard Dermit. The inscription on the tomb, in Cocteau’s hand, reads, ‘I remain with you.’ FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL The frescos include depictions of medicinal plants, many of which grow on the chapel grounds. FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL The medieval town of Milly-la-Forêt, France, was home to Cocteau from 1947 until his death at 74, in 1963. FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STR The salon at Maison Cocteau, the house museum in Milly-la-Forêt, France, where the surrealist poet and director of 1946’s ‘La Belle et la Bête’ lived until his death at 74, in 1963. FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL By EMILY EVANS EERDMANSAug. 4, 2016 3:28 p.m. ET 4 COMMENTS
Surrealist writer, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau first showed up on my radar in 2009 while I was researching a book about eccentric French decorator and antiquaire Madeleine Castaing. Her radical eclecticism—think leopard-patterned carpeting, aqua walls and neoclassical antiques—captivated the It Crowd in post-WWII Paris, including Nina Ricci, Pablo Picasso, Coco Chanel and Cocteau. ENLARGE SURREAL ESTATE | A cast of Jean Cocteau’s hands in his salon PHOTO: FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
After discovering that Cocteau borrowed pieces from Castaing’s shop as set props, I watched his 1946 film, “La Belle et La Bête,” in which tears morph into diamonds and disembodied hands lift a candelabra. He collaborated with her, too, on Maison Cocteau, his home in the French medieval town of Milly-la-Forêt. And since it opened to the public in 2010, I’ve wondered what someone of relatively little means like Cocteau, a rarity among Castaing’s decorating clients, had managed to create with her. So while in Paris this spring, I made the hour train ride to see.
From the front of the 17th-century house, which Cocteau and then-lover Jean Marais bought in 1947, I glimpsed the renaissance turrets of the Château de la Bonde, to which Cocteau’s cottage originally belonged. Then I went inside his home to explore the three rooms that remain as they were when Cocteau died, at 74, in 1963.
The first, the salon, is outfitted mostly in modest 19th-century mahogany furniture; atop every surface sit shells, books, sculpture fragments and ceramics. A favorite trick of Castaing’s lends cohesion to the clutter: All walls are upholstered in a graphic brown print, and a large patterned rug answers in brown and cream. Splashes of red keep the room vibrant as do flashes of brass and gilding—the sunburst ornament over the fireplace, for example, a gift of Coco Chanel.
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Cocteau’s cheetah-cloaked study, including a high-relief paintingPHOTO: FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The salon embraces another Castaing tenet: Every room should include something ugly or unexpected. A carousel horse prances alongside the mahogany table. A gold-metal cast of Cocteau’s hands lopped at the wrist subverts a fairly conventional tableau of paperbacks, colored pencils and a bronze lamp on a butler’s tray table. The juxtaposition strikes me as contemporary, albeit eerie.
Upstairs, in Cocteau’s small study, I found more pieces with a flea-market air—an apothecary cabinet, a gothic-revival desk chair—and the poetic detritus of a highly creative mind. Here, cheetah-print cotton covers the ceiling as well as the walls. It is electrifying. You just don’t see people doing this.
Well, maybe one. New York interior designer Harry Heissman, an admirer of Cocteau and Castaing, enveloped his own tiny living room in leopard-print. “It adds an aura of inspiration and fantasy,” he said. “It also masks the lack of a crown molding and enlarges the room.”
‘Every room should include something ugly or unexpected.’
I dream of creating such a room. I work in a quirkily laid out studio in Greenwich Village. I’ve used leopard carpeting to unify the office, hall and bathroom of the space. But I’m an art and design adviser, and my office must have neutral walls. However, the bold, green banana-leaf pattern of Martinique paper, created for the Beverly Hills Hotel, covers the walls and ceiling of my office bathroom, and a matching curtain hides my shower.
Many would regard Cocteau’s study as kitsch, and some would find it draining to occupy, but I think it’s a good example of working amid things that stimulate you. Lots of them.
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The bed, angled for a view of the gardens he designed. PHOTO: FRANCIS HAMMOND FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Next door, his bedroom walls feature dentil molding and a chair rail, so no need for the all-surface pattern treatment. A chair made of animal horn sits unexpectedly amid mostly simple furniture. A mural believed to be painted by Marais and featuring himself in the bottom right corner covers one wall. But the big draw here is the view of the Cocteau-designed grounds. He angled the canopy bed so the footboard didn’t obscure his sight line to the red-draped window. I recall that Castaing hung crimson curtains in her country house to complement and highlight the green outdoors. In Cocteau’s home, too, the purposefully framed views function as an element of the room.
Although mixing styles has been the interior-design ideal for years now, Cocteau’s décor is so personal and bizarre it seems to mix states of consciousness, too. Mr. Heissman said he took another lesson away from the admitted opium addict’s home. “It helped me listen to a client’s collection, to mix an expensive painting with a starfish,” he said. “Maison Cocteau has what many interiors today lack—a soul.”
Jean Cocteau - Google 圖書結果James S. Williams - 2008 - Biography & Autobiography - 253 頁 From Cocteau’s work in fashion and photography to his formal experimentation to his extensive collaborations with male friends and lovers, the book charts the ... 让·科克托
詹姆斯·S. 威廉姆斯（James S. Williams），英国伦敦大学皇家霍洛威学院教授，主要研究领域为20世纪法国文学与电影。编著有《同性恋书写在法国：理论、小说与电影，1945— 1995》（Gay Signatures: Gay and Lesbian Theory, Fiction and Film in France,1945-1995，1998）、《重写杜拉斯：电影、种族与性别》（Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex，2000）与《让-吕克·戈达尔》（Jean-Luc Godard，2006）等。
A Sportsman's Sketches was an 1852 collection of short stories by Ivan Turgenev. It was the first major writing that gained him recognition. He wrote this ...
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev died in Bougival, Seine-et-Oise, France on this day in 1883 (aged 64).
“You may feed the wolf as you will; he has always a hankering for the woods.” ―from A SPORTSMAN'S NOTEBOOK by Ivan Turgenev獵人(手記)
Ivan Turgenev’s first literary masterpiece is a sweeping portrayal of the magnificent nineteenth–century Russian countryside and the harsh lives of those who inhabited it. In a series of sketches, a hunter wanders through the vast landscape of steppe and forest in search of game, encountering a varied cast of peasants, landlords, bailiffs, overseers, horse traders, and merchants. He witnesses both feudal tyranny and the fatalistic submission of the tyrannized, against a backdrop of the sublime and pitiless terrain of rural Russia. These beautifully embellished, evocative stories were not only universally popular with the reading public but, through the influence they exerted on important members of the Tsarist bureaucracy, contributed to the major political event of mid–nineteenth–century Russia, the Great Emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Rarely has a book that offers such undiluted literary pleasure also been so strong a force for significant social change. With an introduction by Ivan Turgenev, this version was translated by Charles and Natasha Hepburn. READ more here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/180978/a-sportsmans-notebook/
October 27, 2014 -- Updated 1230 GMT (2030 HKT)The avant garde garden design movement dispenses with traditional conceptions of gardens in favor of a more sculpture-like approach. These "Supertrees", designed by Grant Associates, are found in Gardens by the Bay in Singapore. The Supertrees, conceived to be like mature trees "without the wait", are the height of a tall building and support a living "skin" of plants.
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The world's most avant garde gardens
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
The Gardener's Garden showcases some of the most beautiful gardens from around the world
A new generation of gardeners are creating experimental spaces
Modern avant garde designers are considering climate change and water conservation
(CNN) -- When is a garden not a garden? When it's an avant garden.
Designers of the past -- who were concerned with verdant lawns, traditional flowerbeds and tasteful ornaments -- would barely recognize the experimental gardens of today.
"Garden design has always been quite a traditional discipline, says Madison Cox, a garden designer and part of the team behind a new book, The Gardener's Garden.
"Gardens are in a constant state of flux, and you can only do what the plants allow you to do. So it changes less rapidly than painting, sculpture or architecture, as it takes longer to experiment."
Plant vocabulary
There have been other restrictions, too. In the past, garden design was limited by the plants available, as it was difficult to access plants that did not grow indigenously.
But now, says Cox, the "plant vocabulary" has increased.
"Go to any garden center in England, Italy, America or elsewhere, and you'll find plants from all over the world," he says.
This -- together with the influence of radical breakthroughs in the disciplines of painting, sculpture and music -- has allowed a new generation of gardeners to create spaces that owed more to the imagination than tradition.
The birth of a new experimental art form
It started with experiments like Lotusland, an extravagant garden in Santa Barbara, California that was created in the latter half of the 20th Century by Madame Ganna Walska, an eccentric opera singer. It contains exotic plants from all over the world, set in fantasy contexts.
"It's completely mad," says Cox. "The section called the Blue Garden, for instance, has many blue plants and blue-colored slag from a Coca-Cola bottling plant on the ground. The effect is this weird, underwater, blue light, that is at the same time eerie and soothing."
Garden design has always been quite a traditional discipline Madison Cox
Similarly, Marjorelle -- a public garden in Marrakech, Morocco, that attracts about 730,000 visitors a year -- showcases plants that are almost completely devoid of vivid color, and resembles a world of grays, light greens and pale blues.
"The only color comes from things that are not natural, like painted surfaces and pottery," says Cox.
Taking design to the next level
In Kent, England, the garden that belonged to movie director Derek Jarman eschews grass and traditional trees to embrace flotsam, weeds and found objects, creating a space that is in many ways closer to a movie set than a garden.
Modern experimental designers have been taking things to another level. The Red Sand Garden in the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne, Australia, resembles a martian landscape, complete with rock circles, curving escarpments and striking forms and foliage.
However, modern avant garde designers are not completely free from all constraints. "In today's world, we have other pressing environmental issues, such as water conservation," says Cox. "Designers need to consider what is appropriate to the specific climatic conditions they are working in. This is of vital importance."
The Gardener's Garden is available now from Phaidon
The heart of any garden
Ultimately, he says, a garden is a garden if it represents a retreat from the world.
"In recent years there has been an explosion of creativity," he says, "but we have never lost that sense that garden is a paradise, a retreat from the world, and an alternative to our normal surroundings and chaotic lives.
"That has always been the point of a garden, and that will never change."
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Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition by Robert Pogue Harrison 蘇薇星譯 北京三聯 2011 花園:談人之為人不簡單的作者與譯者
“In this book’s two great predecessors, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison took two preoccupying images of the human psyche and considered them with a depth and originality that revealed their unlimited and unbroken presence in every assumption and moment of our lives. Gardens he describes modestly as an essay, but it does, or at least suggests, the same kind of pervasive presence of an underlying human impulse in our relation to the world around us. He does it with eloquence, grace, and erudition rooted in the literatures of his four native languages (including Turkish) that informed his earlier books. The range of his perspective on the human myth suggests that he may be our Bachelard.”—W. S. Merwin
An excerpt from
Gardens
An Essay on the Human Condition
Robert Pogue Harrison
The Vocation of Care
For millennia and throughout world cultures, our predecessors conceived of human happiness in its perfected state as a garden existence. It is impossible to say whether the first earthly paradises of the cultural imagination drew their inspiration from real, humanly cultivated gardens or whether they in fact inspired, at least in part, the art of gardening in its earliest aesthetic flourishes. Certainly there was no empirical precedent for the mineral “garden of the gods” in the Epic of Gilgamesh, described in these terms: “All round Gilgamesh stood bushes bearing gems… there was fruit of carnelian with the vine hanging from it, beautiful to look at; lapis lazuli leaves hung thick with fruit, sweet to see. For thorns and thistles there were haematite and rare stones, agate, and pearls from out of the sea” (The Epic of Gilgamesh, 100). In this oldest of literary works to have come down to us, there is not one but two fantastic gardens. Dilmun, or “the garden of the sun,” lies beyond the great mountains and bodies of water that surround the world of mortals. Here Utnapishtim enjoys the fruits of his exceptional existence. To him alone among humans have the gods granted everlasting life, and with it repose, peace, and harmony with nature. Gilgamesh succeeds in reaching that garden after a trying and desperate journey, only to be forced to return to the tragedies and cares of Uruk, his earthly city, for immortality is denied him. More precisely, immortal life is denied him. For immortality comes in several forms—fame, foundational acts, the enduring memorials of art and scripture—while unending life is the fabulous privilege of only a select few. Among the Greeks, Meneleus was granted this special exemption from death, with direct transport to the gardens of Elysium at the far end of the earth,
where there is made the easiest life for mortals, for there is no snow, nor much winter there, nor is there ever rain, but always the stream of the Ocean sends up breezes of the West Wind blowing briskly for the refreshment of mortals. This, because Helen is yours and you [Meneleus] are son in law therefore to Zeus. —(Odyssey, 4.565û69)
For all her unmatched beauty, it seems that this was what the great fuss over Helen was really all about: whoever possessed her was destined for the Isles of the Blest rather than the gloom of Hades. Men have gone to war for less compelling reasons. By comparison to the ghostly condition of the shades in Hades, a full-bodied existence in Elysium is enviable, to be sure, if only because happiness outside of the body is very difficult for human beings to imagine and impossible for them to desire. (One can desire deliverance from the body, and desire it ardently, but that is another matter.) Even the beatified souls in Dante’s Paradise anticipate with surplus of joy the resurrection of their flesh at the end of time. Their bliss is in fact imperfect until they recover in time what time has robbed them of: the bodily matter with which their personal identity and appearance were bound up. Until the restitution of their bodies at the end of time, the blessed in Dante’s heaven cannot properly recognize one another, which they long to do with their loved ones (in Paradiso 14 [61û66], Dante writes of two groups of saints he meets: “So ready and eager to cry ‘Amen’ / did one chorus and the other seem to me / that clearly they showed their desire for their dead bodies, / not just for themselves but for their mothers, / and fathers, and the others who were dear to them / before they became sempiternal flames”). In that respect all of us on Earth, insofar as we are in our body, are more blessed than the saints in Dante’s heaven. It is otherwise with the likes of Meneleus and Utnapishtim and Adam and Eve before the fall. The fantastic garden worlds of myth are places where the elect can possess the gift of their bodies without paying the price for the body’s passions, can enjoy the fruits of the earth without being touched by the death and disease that afflicts all things earthly, can soak up the sunlight so sorely missed by their colleagues in Hades without being scorched by its excess and intensity. For a very long time, this endless prolongation of bodily life in a gardenlike environment, protected from the tribulations of pain and mortality, was the ultimate image of the good life. Or was it? Certainly Meneleus is in no hurry to sail off to his islands in the stream. Telemachus finds him still reigning over his kingdom, a man among men. There is no doubt that Meneleus would opt for Elysium over Hades—any of us would—but would he gladly give up his worldly life prematurely for that garden existence? It seems not. Why? Because earthly paradises like Dilmun and Elysium offer ease and perpetual spring at the cost of an absolute isolation from the world of mortals—isolation from friends, family, city, and the ongoing story of human action and endeavor. Exile from both the private and public spheres of human interaction is a sorry condition, especially for a polis-loving people like the Greeks. It deprives one of both the cares and the consolations of mortal life, to which most of us are more attached than we may ever suspect. To go on living in such isolated gardens, human beings must either denature themselves like Utnapishtim, who is no longer fully human after so many centuries with no human companionship other than his wife, or else succumb to the melancholia that afflicts the inhabitants of Dante’s Elysian Fields in Limbo, where, as Virgil tells the pilgrim, sanza speme vivemo in disio, we live in desire without hope. As Thoreau puts it in Walden,“Be it life or death, we crave only reality” (61). If Meneleus took that craving for reality with him to Elysium, his everlasting life there is a mixed blessing indeed. But why are we posing hypothetical questions to Meneleus when we can consult Odysseus directly? Kalypso’s island, where Odysseus was marooned for several years, is in every respect a kind of Isle of the Blest in the far-flung reaches of the ocean: a flourishing green environment with fountains, vines, violets, and birds. Here is how Homer describes the scene, which is prototypical of many subsequent such idyllic scenes in Western literature:
She was singing inside the cave with a sweet voice as she went up and down the loom and wove with a golden shuttle. There was a growth of grove around the cavern, flourishing, alder was there, and the black poplar, and fragrant cypress, and there were birds with spreading wings who made their nests in it, little owls, and hawks, and birds of the sea with long beaks who are like ravens, but all their work is on the sea water; and right about the hollow cavern extended a flourishing growth of vine that ripened with grape clusters. Next to it there were four fountains, and each of them ran shining water, each next to each, but turned to run in sundry directions; and round about there were meadows growing soft with parsley and violets, and even a god who came into that place would have admired what he saw, his heart delighted within him. —(5.63û74)
This is the enchanted place that Kalpyso invites Odysseus to share with her permanently, with an offer of immortality included in the bargain. But we know the story: cold to her offer, Odysseus spends all his days on the desolate seashore with his back to the earthly paradise, sulking, weeping, yearning for his homecoming to harsh and craggy Ithaca and his aging wife. Nothing can console him for his exile from “the land of his fathers” with its travails and responsibilities. Kalypso is incapable of stilling within his breast his desire to repossess the coordinates of his human identity, of which he is stripped on her garden island. Even the certainty that death awaits him after a few decades of life on Ithaca cannot persuade him to give up his desire to return to that very different, much more austere island. What Odysseus longs for on Kalypso’s island—what keeps him in a state of exile there—is a life of care. More precisely, he longs for the world in which human care finds its fulfillment; in his case, that is the world of family, homeland, and genealogy. Care, which is bound to worldliness, does not know what to do with itself in a worldless garden in the middle of the ocean. It is the alienated core of care in his human heart that sends Odysseus to the shore every morning and keeps him out of place in the unreal environment of Kalypso’s island. “If you only knew in your own heart how many hardships / you were fated to undergo before getting back to your country, / you would stay here with me and be lord of this household and be an immortal” (5.206û9). But Kalypso is a goddess—a “shining goddess” at that—and she scarcely can understand the extent to which Odysseus, insofar as he is human, is held fast by care, despite or perhaps even because of the burdens that care imposes on him. If Homer’s Odysseus remains to this day an archetype of the mortal human, it is because of the way he is embraced by care in all its unyielding tenacity. An ancient parable has come down to us across the ages which speaks eloquently of the powerful hold that the goddess Cura has on human nature:
Once when Care was crossing a river, she saw some clay; she thoughtfully took up a piece and began to shape it. While she was meditating on what she had made, Jupiter came by. Care asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she wanted her name to be bestowed upon it, he forbade this, and demanded that it be given his name instead. While Care and Jupiter were disputing, Earth arose and desired that her own name be conferred on the creature, since she had furnished it with part of her body. They asked Saturn to be their arbiter, and he made the following decision, which seemed a just one: “Since you, Jupiter, have given its spirit, you shall receive that spirit at its death; and since you, Earth, have given its body, you shall receive its body. But since Care first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives. And because there is now a dispute among you as to its name, let it be called homo, for it is made out of humus (earth).”
Until such time as Jupiter receives its spirit and Earth its body, the ensouled matter of homo belongs to Cura, who “holds” him for as long as he lives (Cura teneat, quamdiu vixerit). If Odysseus is a poetic character for Care’s hold on humans, we can understand why he cannot lie easily in Kalypso’s arms. Another less joyful goddess than Kalypso already has her claims on him, calling him back to a land plowed, cultivated, and cared for by his fathers and forefathers. Given that Cura formed homo out of humus, it is only “natural” that her creature should direct his care primarily toward the earth from which his living substance derives. Thus it is above all the land of his fathers—as Homer repeats on several occasions—that calls Odysseus back to Ithaca. We must understand the concept of land not merely geographically but materially, as the soil cultivated by his ancestors and the earth in which their dead bodies are buried. Had Odysseus been forced to remain on Kalypso’s island for the rest of his endless days, and had he not lost his humanity in the process, he most likely would have taken to gardening, no matter how redundant such an activity might have been in that environment. For human beings like Odysseus, who are held fast by care, have an irrepressible need to devote themselves to something. A garden that comes into being through one’s own labor and tending efforts is very different from the fantastical gardens where things preexist spontaneously, offering themselves gratuitously for enjoyment. And if we could have seen Odysseus’s patch of cultivated ground from the air, it would have appeared to us as a kind of oasis—an oasis of care—in the landscape of Kalypso’s home world. For unlike earthly paradises, human-made gardens that are brought into and maintained in being by cultivation retain a signature of the human agency to which they owe their existence. Call it the mark of Cura. While care is a constant, interminable condition for human beings, specific human cares represent dilemmas or intrigues that are resolved in due time, the way the plots of stories are resolved in due time. Odysseus experiences the endless delays that keep him from returning home as so much wasted time—for it is only with his return home that the temporal process of resolution can resume its proper course. His story cannot go forward in Kalypso’s earthly paradise, for the latter is outside both world and time. Thus it represents a suspension of the action by which his present cares—which revolve around reclaiming his kingdom and household—work toward an outcome. No resolution is final, of course, and even death does not put an end to certain cares (as Odysseus learns when he talks to the shades of his dead companions in the land of the dead). Yet in general human beings experience time as the working out of one care after another. Here too we find a correlation between care and gardens. A humanly created garden comes into being in and through time. It is planned by the gardener in advance, then it is seeded or cultivated accordingly, and in due time it yields its fruits or intended gratifications. Meanwhile the gardener is beset by new cares day in and day out. For like a story, a garden has its own developing plot, as it were, whose intrigues keep the caretaker under more or less constant pressure. The true gardener is always “the constant gardener.” The account of the creation of humankind in the Cura fable has certain affinities with, but also marked differences from, the account in Genesis, where the Maker of heaven and earth created a naive, slow-witted Adam and put him in the Garden of Eden, presumably so that Adam could “keep” the garden, but more likely (judging from the evidence) to shield him from the reality of the world, as parents are sometimes wont to do with their children. If he had wanted to make Adam and Eve keepers of the garden, God should have created them as caretakers; instead he created them as beneficiaries, deprived of the commitment that drives a gardener to keep his or her garden. It would seem that it was precisely this overprotection on God’s part that caused Adam and Eve to find themselves completely defenseless when it came to the serpent’s blandishments. Despite God’s best intentions, it was a failure of foresight on his part (a failure of gardening, as it were) to think that Adam and Eve could become caretakers of Eden’s privileged environment when he, God, went to such lengths to make sure that his creatures had not a care in the world. Indeed, with what insouciance Adam and Eve performed the momentous act that gets them expelled from Eden! “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat” (Genesis 3:6). It was not overbearing pride, nor irrepressible curiosity, nor rebellion against God, nor even the heady thrill of transgression which caused them to lose, in one mindless instant, their innocence. The act was committed without fear and trembling, without the dramas of temptation or fascination of the forbidden, in fact without any real motivation at all. It was out of sheer carelessness that they did it. And how could it have been otherwise, given that God had given them no occasion to acquire a sense of responsibility? The problem with Adam and Eve in the garden was not so much their will to disobedience as their casual, thoughtless, and childlike disposition. It was a disposition without resistance, as the serpent quickly discovered upon his first attempt to get Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. It was only after the fall that Adam acquired a measure of resiliency and character. In Eden, Adam was unburdened by worries but incapable of devotion. Everything was there for him (including his wife). After his exile, he was there for all things, for it was only by dedicating himself that he could render humanly inhabitable an environment that did not exist for his pleasure and that exacted from him his daily labor. Out of this extension of self into the world was born the love of something other than oneself (hence was born human culture as such). For all that it cost future humankind, the felix culpa of our mythic progenitors accomplished at least this much: it made life matter. For humans are fully human only when things matter. Nothing was at stake for Adam and Eve in the garden until suddenly, in one decisive moment of self-revelation, everything was at stake. Such were the garden’s impossible alternatives: live in moral oblivion within its limits or gain a sense of reality at the cost of being thrown out. But did we not pay a terrible price—toil, pain and death—for our humanization? That is exactly the wrong question to ask. The question rather is whether the gift of the Garden of Eden—for Eden was a gift—was wasted on us prior to the price we paid through our expulsion. As Yeats said of hearts: “Hearts are not had as gifts but hearts are earned / by those that are not entirely beautiful” (“Prayer for My Daughter,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 188). In Eden, Adam and Eve were altogether too beautiful, hence also heartless. They had to earn their human hearts outside of the garden, if only in order to learn what beauty is, as well as what a gift it is. Through Adam and Eve we lost a gift but earned a heart, and in many ways we are still earning our heart, just as we are still learning that most of what the earth offers—despite its claims on our labor—has the character of something freely given rather than aggressively acquired. Eden was a paradise for contemplation, but before Adam and Eve could know the quiet ecstasy of contemplation, they had to be thrown into the thick of the vita activa. The vita activa, if we adopt Hannah Arendt’s concept of it, consists of labor, work, and action. Labor is the endless and inglorious toil by which we secure our biological survival, symbolized by the sweat of Adam’s brow as he renders the earth fruitful, contending against blight, drought, and disaster. But biological survival alone does not make us human. What distinguishes us in our humanity is the fact that we inhabit relatively permanent worlds that precede our birth and outlast our death, binding the generations together in a historical continuum. These worlds, with their transgenerational things, houses, cities, institutions, and artworks, are brought into being by work. While labor secures our survival, work builds the worlds that make us historical. The historical world, in turn, serves as the stage for human action, the deeds and speech through which human beings realize their potential for freedom and affirm their dignity in the radiance of the public sphere. Without action, human work is meaningless and labor is fruitless. Action is the self-affirmation of the human before the witness of the gods and the judgment of one’s fellow humans. Whether one subscribes to Arendt’s threefold schematization or not, it is clear that a life of action, pervaded through and through by care, is what has always rendered human life meaningful. Only in the context of such meaningfulness could the experience of life acquire a depth and density denied to our primal ancestors in the garden. To put it differently: only our expulsion from Eden, and the fall into the vita activa that ensued from it, could make us fit for and worthy of the gift of life, to say nothing of the gift of Eden. Adam and Eve were not ready—they lacked the maturity—to become keepers of the garden. To become keepers they first would have to become gardeners. It was only by leaving the Garden of Eden behind that they could realize their potential to become cultivators and givers, instead of mere consumers and receivers. Regarding that potential, we must not forget that Adam, like homo in the Cura fable, was made out of clay, out of earth, out of humus. It’s doubtful whether any creature made of such matter could ever, in his deeper nature, be at home in a garden where everything is provided. Someone of Adam’s constitution cannot help but hear in the earth a call to self-realization through the activation of care. His need to engage the earth, to make it his place of habitation, if only by submitting himself to its laws—this need would explain why Adam’s sojourn in Eden was at bottom a form of exile and why the expulsion was a form of repatriation. Once Jupiter breathed spirit into the matter out of which homo was composed, it became a living human substance that was as spiritual in essence as it was material. In its humic unity it lent itself to cultivation, or more precisely to self-cultivation. That is why the human spirit, like the earth that gives homo his body, is a garden of sorts—not an Edenic garden handed over to us for our delectation but one that owes its fruits to the provisions of human care and solicitation. That is also why human culture in its manifold domestic, institutional, and poetic expressions owes its flowering to the seed of a fallen Adam. Immortal life with Kalypso or in Elysium or in the garden of the sun has its distinct appeal, to be sure, yet human beings hold nothing more dear than what they bring into being, or maintain in being, through their own cultivating efforts. This despite the fact that many among us still consider our expulsion from Eden a curse rather than a blessing. When Dante reaches the Garden of Eden at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, he brings his full humanity with him into that recovered earthly paradise, having gained entrance to it by way of a laborious moral self-discipline that took him down through the circles of hell and up the reformatory terraces of Purgatory. Nor does his journey reach its endpoint in Eden, for it continues up through the celestial spheres toward some other more exalted garden: the great celestial rose of the heavenly Empyrium. Yet never once during his journey does the poet-pilgrim lose or forfeit the human care in his heart. Even in the upper reaches of Paradise, the fate of human history—what human beings make of it through their own devotion or dereliction—remains his paramount concern. In particular it is the fate of Italy, which Dante calls the “garden of the empire,” which dominates the poet’s concern throughout the poem. To speak of Italy as a garden that is being laid to waste through neglect and moral turpitude takes the garden out of Eden and puts it back onto a mortal earth, where gardens come into being through the tending of human care and where they are not immune from the ravages of winter, disease, decay, and death. If Dante is a quintessentially human poet, it is because the giardino dello ’mperio mattered more to him in the end than either Eden or the celestial Rose. If we are not able to keep our garden, if we are not able to take care of our mortal human world, heaven and salvation are vain. To affirm that the fall was a repatriation and a blessing is not to deny that there is an element of curse in the human condition. Care burdens us with many indignities. The tragedies that befall us (or that we inflict upon ourselves) are undeniably beyond all natural proportion. We have a seemingly infinite capacity for misery. Yet if the human race is cursed, it is not so much because we have been thrown into suffering and mortality, nor because we have a deeper capacity for suffering than other creatures, but rather because we take suffering and mortality to be confirmations of the curse rather than the preconditions of human self-realization. At the same time, we have a tendency to associate this putative curse with the earth, to see the earth as the matrix of pain, death, corruption, and tragedy rather than the matrix of life, growth, appearance, and form. It is no doubt a curse that we do not properly value what has been freely given as long as we are its daily beneficiaries. Achilles, who had a warrior’s contempt for life while he lived, must die and enter Hades before coming to realize that a slave living under the sun is more blessed than any lord of the dead. When Odysseus attempts to console him during his visit to the underworld, Achilles will have none of it: “O shining Odysseus,” he says, “never try to console me for dying. / I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another / man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on, / than be a king over all the perished dead” (11.488û91). The slave is happier than the shade not because he is laboring under the sun but because he is under the sun, that is to say on the earth. To the dead Achilles, the former seems like a small price to pay for the latter (“I am no longer there under the light of the sun,” he declares regretfully [498]). That such knowledge almost invariably comes too late is part of care’s curse. Care engages and commits us, yet it also has a way of blinding us. Achilles’ eyes are open for a moment, but even in death they close quickly again when his passions are enflamed. In no time at all, while speaking to Odysseus, he imagines himself back in the world of the living not as a slave but as his former formidable and destructive self, killing his enemies and perpetuating the cycle of reciprocal violence: “[I] am not the man I used to be once, when in wide Troad / I killed the best of their people, fighting for the Argives. If only / for a little while I could come like that to the house of my father, / my force and invincible hands would terrify such men / as use force on him and keep him away from his rightful honors” (499û504). That our cares bind us so passionately to our living world, that they are so tenacious as to continue to torment us after death, and that they blind us to the everyday blessings we so sorely miss once we lose them—this suggests that there may be something incorrigible in our nature which no amount of self-cultivation will overcome or transfigure. It is impossible to know for sure, for the story of human care has not yet come to an end.
Why do gardens matter so much and mean so much to people? That is the intriguing question to which David Cooper seeks an answer in this book. Given the enthusiasm for gardens in human civilization ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, it is surprising that the question has been so long neglected by modern philosophy. Now at last there is a philosophy of gardens. David Cooper identifies garden appreciation as a special human phenomenon distinct from both from the appreciation of art and the appreciation of nature. He discusses the contribution of gardening and other garden-related pursuits to "the good life." And he distinguishes the many kinds of meanings that gardens may have, from their representation of nature to their spiritual significance. A Philosophy of Gardens will open up this subject to students and scholars of aesthetics, ethics, and cultural and environmental studies, and to anyone with a reflective interest in things horticultural.
Reviews
"Cooper's thoughful and engaging book is indeed A Philosophy of Gardens -- his rather unique and stimulating way of conceptualizing how, carefully reflected upom, gardening practices and appreciation can engender an epiphany of sorts on the mysteries of existence."--Donald Crawford, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
In 2013 Don presented an episode of Great British Garden Revival. In 2015 he presented The Secret History of the British Garden a BBC Two series, in four parts, charting the development of British gardens from the 17th to the 20th century.[31]
從1840年Derby開始，到1880年，全英國每個鄉鎮都有自己的開放公園。維多利亞時代的工業化、科技、廣收世界品種，造就此世紀的諸多造園特色。 The Secret History of the British Garden, 3 The 19th Century
Monty Don looks at the evolution of the British garden. He explores the extraordinary transformations that occurred throughout the 19th…
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17世紀的花園只留下一座Levens Hall in Cumbria，不過300多年的紀錄都留著。此園的haha 為英國首見，讓18世紀的景觀園可以大發揮。 瑪麗皇后將Hampton Court Palace的法式改成荷蘭式；他們吃些蔬菜。 17世紀最早留下的未完成的園 Luftwaffe，依照所有者的天主教信仰，給諸多宗教象徵，如5面各5英尺的角樓--25--聖家族，20世紀德國考古學者的照片顯現出pattern.... The Secret History of the British Garden, 1 The 17th Century
Montagu Denis Wyatt "Monty" Don (born 8 July 1955)[1] is a British television presenter, writer and speaker on horticulture, best known for presenting the BBC television seriesGardeners' World.
Beginning with the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Rome, this work uncovers the evidence of gardening through the art, history and literature of these early sites of culture, as well as later findings of archaeology. It then moves to such later civilizations as Islam and Mughal India.
The gardens of the worlds great civilizations are revealed through sumptuous color plates and a fascinating text.
With its sumptuous color plates, comprehensive scope, and fascinating text, this ground-breaking international history of the garden as an art form is easily the most ambitious and rewarding work of its kind. Beginning with the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, this book skillfully uncovers the evidence of gardening through the art, history, and literature of these early sites of culture, as well as later findings of archaeology. It then takes us farther afield into the later civilizations of Islam and Mughal India, reveals the important contributions of Italy and France, China and Japan, lingers in the incomparable gardens of England, and finally transports us to the New World.
Structured around themes of the international exchange of aesthetic ideas and the exciting saga of the study, cultivation, and distribution of plant life, the books progression is both chronological and geographic; each chapter identifies and discusses the major design and horticultural contributions made to garden history in each period and by each society. Although there have been numerous garden histories, there has never been one of this historical and global scope, a history that is solidly based in the authors vast learning, both in the worlds of literature and art as well as gardening, and graced by is masterful prose. Another factor that differentiates this comprehensive history from the others is its final section, which explores the dramatic impact on Europe of the discovery in 1492 of a new continent with its own unique flora and fauna, which led to the opening of a fresh chapter in science. The author develops this section of the book through an extensive coverage of the history of garden culture in the Western Hemisphere, beginning with the worldwide exchange of new plant discoveries starting in the seventeenth century as European plantsmen scoured the world for exotic additions to the plantings in fledgling botanical gardens. Beginning with what is known of colonial American gardens and the extraordinary efforts in this century to reconstruct them at such sites as Mount Vernon, Monticello, and especially Williamsburg, the author leads us through the accomplishments of New World gardeners, including those of South America and Mexico, ending up with a survey of the newest international developments in gardening.
From ancient Persia to the modern private estates of Europe and North America, gardening has been one of the most consistent signs of a great civilization and the most visually absorbing expression of culture.
William Howard Adams has served as a senior fellow of the Garden History Library at Dumbarton Oaks and has written and lectured widely on the history of the garden. His study, The French Garden, 1500-1800, and his more recent Jeffersons Monticello, and Roberto Burle Marx: The Unnatural Art of the Garden, have been universally acclaimed. Mr. Adams is a fellow of the Myrin Institute.
The inaugural event's theme, Utopia By Design, celebrates the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s novel
NYTIMES.COM|由 SAMANTHA TSE 上傳
Ever since Thomas More wrote Utopia 500 years ago, visionaries from William Morris to Ursula K Leguin have dreamed of ideal worlds. But beneath the fig-leaf of fiction, the results are often bland – or bloody
Ever since Thomas More wrote Utopia 500 years ago, visionaries from William Morris to Ursula K Le Guin have dreamed of ideal worlds. But beneath the fig-leaf of fiction, the results are often bland – or bloody
narcolepsy The term narcolepsy derives from the French word narcolepsie created by the French physician Jean-Baptiste-Édouard Gélineau by combining the Greek νάρκη (narkē, "numbness" or "stupor"),[4][5] and λῆψις (lepsis), "attack" or "seizure".發作性嗜睡病（Narcolepsy），又名猝睡症、渴睡症，是一種睡眠障礙，與睡眠機制相關的異常。最早是由美國史丹佛大學的附屬醫院發現。
一九五〇年代南洋那邊有很多人在讀《安妮日記》。我記不清我讀的英文譯本是叫The diary of Anni Frank還是The diary of Young Girl。燕姐說她父親是日據時代心臟病發死在集中營裡，她於是恨德國人，恨日本人，格外愛讀《安妮日記》。三十年代安妮全家逃出納粹德國去了荷蘭的阿姆斯特丹避難。一九四一年德軍佔領荷蘭，為了逃避強勞營，他們全家和另外四個猶太人一九四二年七月躲進一家食品店樓上倉庫，靠樓下非猶太人送貨物維生。一九四四年八月蓋世太保根據密報抓走他們關進集中營，全家罹難，父親倖存。俄國人解救奧斯維辛之後，有人在他們躲藏的倉庫裡找到安妮寫的故事和日記，全部交給安妮的父親。一九四七年日記發表。燕姐說的初版也許是那個最早的荷蘭原文本。那天，她在書堆裡找出英文本給我看，扉頁上寫英文字「送給我的甜心，湯姆。一九五三年於巴達維亞」。巴達維亞是荷治時代雅加達舊城。燕姐說湯姆是她的舊情人，英荷混血，帥極了，她懷孕打胎，手術失誤，不能生育了。不久湯姆回英國學醫，在蘇格蘭做醫生。
“Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether.” ―from SONS AND LOVERS
Sons and Lovers版本史與字眼的文化史：purgatory、afterlife 這段話，很值得討論：
Mrs Morel always said the after-life would hold nothing in store for her husband: he rose from the lower world into purgatory, when he came home from pit, and passed into heaven in the Palmerston Arms. Sons and Lovers - Edited out of the 1913 edition, restored in 1992
(這段，一般中譯本從缺。 The original 1913 edition was heavily edited by Edward Garnett who removed 80 passages, roughly a tenth of the text. The novel is dedicated to Garnett. Garnett, as the literary advisor to the publishing firm Duckworth, was an important figure in leading Lawrence further into the London literary world during the years 1911 and 1912. It was not until the 1992 Cambridge University Press edition was released that the missing text was restored.)
D. H. Lawrence, Helen Baron, Carl Baron - 2002 - Literary Collections
Mrs Morel always said the after-life would hold nothing in store for her husband:he rose from the lower world into purgatory, when he came home from pit, and ...
“Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether.” —from SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
The struggle for power at the heart of a family in conflict, the mysteries of sexual initiation, and the pain of irretrievable loss are the universal motifs with which D. H. Lawrence fashions one of the world’s most original autobiographical novels.Gertrude Morel is a refined woman who married beneath her and has come to loathe her brutal, working-class husband. She focuses her passion instead on her two sons, who return her love and despise their father. Trouble begins when Paul Morel, a budding artist, falls in love with a young woman who seems capable of rivaling his mother for possession of his soul. In the ensuing battle, he finds his path to adulthood tragically impeded by the enduring power of his mother’s grasp. Published on the eve of World War I, SONS AND LOVERS confirmed Lawrence’s genius and inaugurated the controversy over his explicit writing about sexuality and human relationships that would follow him to the end of his career.
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最近幾天補讀永安翻譯的The Vicar’s Garden and Other Stories by D. H. Lawrence
台灣的出版社或為銷路，故意用書中一篇《密愛》當書名，其實我初看此兩字，根本無法想像原篇的英文……
DHL 的文字，就是那麼不同。或許，所有的翻譯都無法取代原文。連書名都無法認真翻譯…..
譬如說，A Sort of Life by Graham Greene*
這種說法，是英國人歷盡滄桑或玩世不恭時的用語。
譬如說；
“ Well, what a man to do? It’s no sort of life for a man of my years, to sit at my own hearth like a stranger….”ODOUR OF CHRYSANTHEMUMS by D. H. Lawrence
The Paris Review Philia roughly translates to “friendship” in Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” an enduring source for understanding the ethics of friendship
Philia, the root of Philadelphia, roughly translates to “friendship” in Aristotle’sNicomachean Ethics, an enduring source for understanding the ethics of friendship. Aristotle identifies three essential bases for friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. Friendships of virtue, Aristotle believes, are ideal because only they are based on recognition.
When I was thirty, I moved back to Philadelphia. I had only been gone a few years, and though I knew better, I had half expected it to be just as I’d left it. It was not: most of my friends had left the city altogether or moved, married, to the edges of town. Occasionally, I would run into people I had once known, encounters that produced deep and surprising embarrassment in me; unexplained life choices digested in fast, always alienating, appraisal. The more unsettling thing was that my close friendships were changing, too.
Friendship has never seemed both more important and less relevant than it does now. The concept surfaces primarily when we worry over whether our networked lives impair the quality of our connections, our community. On a nontheoretical level, adult friendship is its own puzzle. The friendships we have as adults are the intentional kind, if only because time is short. During this period, I began to consider the subject. What is essential in friendship? Why do we tolerate difference and distance? What is the appropriate amount to give? And around this same time, I discovered the curious, decades-long friendship between the writers Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and the sculptor Wharton Esherick. Their relationship seemed to me model in some ways; they were friends for over twenty years, mostly living in different cities. Each man was dedicated to pursuing his own line of work, and the insecurities and single-mindedness of ambition seemed analogous too to the ways that adulthood can separate us from our friends.
Wharton Esherick’s studio and living space is preserved as a museum, about thirty miles outside Philadelphia. It stands in a cluster of the artist’s other handmade buildings on a little wooded lot. Esherick created much of what is found inside the museum, from the smooth-grained floorboards to the furniture, chairs, and oblong tables balanced on shapely legs or held up by a geometry of them. There are carved doors and coat pegs, tiny busts of the workmen who built the house, plus that of a songbird that often visited. In what used to be the bedroom is a photograph of Sherwood Anderson. “I produce because I want to make something with my talent equal to [my friend’s] production,” Esherick once said. “Fine music makes fine pictures. Fine pictures make fine drama. Fine drama makes fine music or poetry or song. Each stimulates the other… ”
Esherick met Anderson in the propitious-sounding refuge of Fairhope, Alabama. It was spring, 1920. Friendship, some say, is the province of youth, but Esherick was thirty-two when he met Anderson, who was forty-three at the time. Each man was near the start of his artistic career. (Anderson had recently published Winesburg, Ohio). Fairhope was a respite for Anderson from a struggling marriage; for Esherick, it was an escape from financial stress. The colony was (and remains today) a single-tax community, born from socialist utopian ideals. “A resort &hellip full of middle class eccentrics… ” Anderson sniffed at first arrival. Later, even he was seduced by the idylls of the place. (He declared he’d gone “color mad”). It was a productive, happy time; the men spent mornings at work and afternoons in shared recreation, in the woods or on the water.
Legend has it that it was Anderson who spied Esherick’s talent for woodwork first. At the time, Esherick considered himself a painter, and he was planning an exhibition for the community. As an experiment, he carved a frame for his painting Moonlight. The frame is engraved with sprays of pine needles gilded in bronze paint. It surrounds a dark impressionist-looking painting of a stand of Alabama pines. Anderson is said to have advised Esherick to quit painting for woodwork on sight. The influence that Anderson had on Esherick’s move from painting is unknown, but it’s not hard to imagine that Anderson’s recognition and encouragement of Esherick’s talent came at an opportune time. Esherick had been frustrated by his inability to find his own painting style. “If I can’t paint like Esherick, I can at least sculpt like Esherick,“ the artist said.
Do all friendships have a Fairhope-like heart, wherein the potential of friendship is a place, real or imagined, that we continue to inhabit even when reality challenges sentiment? Sentiment, the thing that Lionel Trilling said cost Anderson the ability to convey meaning in writing, may have no better host than friendship. Consider Anderson’s story “Loneliness.” In it, Enoch Robinson is a man of secret ambition and yearning. He sets out to be an artist in the familiar way. He goes to New York City and discovers people who set him aflame with enthusiasm, but who also have the uneasy effect of making him stupefied and mute, sidelined. Somewhat abruptly, Enoch gets married, becomes a father, dispatches to the suburbs. For a time, he takes pride in appearances, but a gnawing dissatisfaction gets the better of him. He leaves. Alone, Enoch peoples a room with invisible men and women, in whose special company Enoch finds happiness at last. When he meets a woman who promises real companionship, he feels his imaginary friends threatened. He drives her away and she flees, “taking all his people with her.”
There is an uneasy symmetry between the lives of Sherwood Anderson and Enoch Robinson. Anderson was a prosperous businessman until he made a dramatic break from his job and family. Shortly after, he took up writing full time. Anderson even kept a room in his country house full of photos of friends and men he admired. ‘[Y]ou may think it’s a poor substitute,” he wrote to H. L. Menken, in a letter requesting that Menken send a picture to add to his wall, “but a picture framed and hung up in a room I am in and out of every day does seem to bring my friends closer… ” The letter carries a whiff of Enoch Robinson’s ruinous impulses, giving the faint impression that friendship is a self-validating enterprise, friends themselves less important. Fortunately, likeness is fleeting. Enoch, hamstrung by ego, threatened by actuality, is condemned to life as an outcast; Anderson had many friends and admirers. And though he built a career on writing about alienation as a symptom of industrial life, he was not indifferent to its pleasures. He died, in 1941, after choking on a martini toothpick while cruise-bound for South America.
One day in 1916, Anderson, a longtime admirer of Dreiser’s, dropped in on the other man, uninvited. Dreiser closed the door in Anderson’s face, then promptly went to his desk to write a letter to Anderson apologizing for the bad behavior. “My first attempt to come a little closer to Dreiser,” Anderson admitted later, “was a failure.” Esherick’s first overtures to Dreiser were similarly rebuffed. Invited by an actress named Kirah Markham, Dreiser visited a theater near where the Eshericks lived with instructions to stay with the Eshericks overnight. It was 1924. When the theater lights dimmed, Esherick tapped Dreiser on the shoulder to whisper introduction and Dreiser, surprised, awkward as ever, pointedly ignored him.
The letters between Anderson, Esherick, and Dreiser are rich in the Aristotelian pleasure. Letters sent between 1920 and 1940 note arrivals, departures, delays, and visits to and from homes in Paoli, rural Virginia, New York City, and Mount Kisco. The men sailed on the Barnegat Bay, walked together in woods, drank and socialized together. They were ribald. Esherick’s papers include letters decorated with lusty doodles, a bosomy woman showering nude, a sketch of Anderson’s enormous rear end. Utility, too, emerges in material and emotional support. Dreiser employed Esherick to work on Dreiser’s country house in Mount Kisco; Esherick collaborated with Anderson on his collection of essays No Swank. When Esherick’s wife was hospitalized, it was Dreiser who offered words of reassurance and support. Dreiser penned Anderson’s eulogy and Esherick created the gravestone, a crescent that rises out of the ground, curving round itself, that reads, “Life, not death, is the great adventure.”
I had hoped the letters might reveal something about friendship: how to be a good friend, when to let go. And they did—but in negative. Virtue, it seems, lives in action; the ways that we make recognition known in matters important and not. Dreiser to Esherick: “Your future today is absolutely all ahead of you.” Anderson to Dreiser: “Jennie, Sister Carrie, the boy in Tragedy … In any one of such stories you break so much ground… ” Esherick’s scene-by-scene report to Anderson about the performance of a staging of Anderson’s Winesburg near Esherick’s home. The men gossiped, joked, and advised each other on reading, professional opportunities, family matters.
Friendship, Aristotle suggests, is the most immediate form of public personhood; it motivates a person for moral excellence, ennobles us to become a stronger unit for a social whole. And yet, the thing is this: the very material of friendship is the exchange of it. In friendship, sentiment is the relationship. Friendship may have a public aspect, but it is essentially a private exchange. If the letters between Anderson, Esherick, and Dreiser showed me anything, it is that friendship remains the special provenance of those who live it.
My own friendships go on changing, adjusting by degrees to demands that I won’t totally understand. A becomes a parent. B wrestles over what a career should look like. C’s stubborn nostalgia threatens to uproot what we still have in common. The reassuring thing is that no single law rules over us. Friendship is a return, as variable as we are.
Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber was a German composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist and critic, one of the first significant composers of the Romantic ...
In 1810, Weber visited several cities throughout Germany; from 1813 to 1816 he was director of the Opera in Prague; from 1816 to 1817 he worked in Berlin, and from 1817 onwards he was director of the prestigious Opera in Dresden, working hard to establish a German opera, in reaction to the Italian opera which had dominated the European music scene since the 18th century. On 4 November 1817, he married Caroline Brandt, a singer who created the title role of Silvana.[3] In 1819, he wrote perhaps his most famous piano piece,Invitation to the Dance.
The grave of Carl Maria von Weber, Old Catholic Cemetery, Dresden
In 1823, Weber composed the opera Euryanthe to a mediocre libretto, but containing much rich music, the overture of which in particular anticipates Richard Wagner. In 1824, Weber received an invitation from The Royal Opera, London, to compose and produce Oberon, based onChristoph Martin Wieland's poem of the same name. Weber accepted the invitation, and in 1826 he travelled to England, to finish the work and conduct the premiere on 12 April.
Weber was already suffering from tuberculosis when he visited London. He died of the disease whilst at the house of Sir George Smart during the night of 4/5 June 1826.[3] Weber was 39 years old. He was initially buried in London, but 18 years later his remains were transferred to the family burial plot in the Old Catholic Cemetery (Alten Katholischen Friedhof) in west Dresden. The simple gravestone was designed by Gottfried Semper and lies against the northern boundary wall. The eulogy at the reburial was performed by Richard Wagner.
His unfinished opera Die drei Pintos (The Three Pintos) was originally given by Weber's widow toGiacomo Meyerbeer for completion; it was eventually completed by Gustav Mahler, who conducted the first performance in this form in Leipzig on 20 January 1888.
卡爾·馬利亞·弗里德里希·恩斯特·馮·韋伯（德語：Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber，1786年11月18日或19日－1826年6月5日），德國作曲家。
ENLARGE
