I.
We live in an age that lionizes the successful, and that further confuses success in business with wisdom. Thus, as I noted today, we confuse the fastest man in the world with the best athlete. (When even the first to finish is not always the fastest.)
II.
Take that miserable misanthrope and the subject of fawning biographies and biopics, inane articles, and subpar historical television series. He might once have inspired Ebenezer Scrooge - if Dickens had rated him worth mentioning. He will not be remembered (by other than the likes of me) in a single brief century, and will have contributed nothing to ensuring that there is anything at all to remember. Only sycophants could call this genius.
III.
The biggest luxury, I am told, is time. And time passes, as we all know; but such a statement tells us nothing at all about its value; time is the tree endlessly falling in the forest. (Prehistoric time means something, but for millennia meant nothing to anyone - so I might sum up my sister's studies and my own.) Innumerable articles talk about how the wealthy and successful achieve their success through a singleminded on their goals and an allocation of their time to only the most important things. Certainly it's true that money can spare us time doing activities that we often define as tedious: laundry, shopping, waiting in line, housecleaning, cooking, commuting, dog-walking, child-rearing, tending to our infirm elderly. But the question of what we are we doing with the time that we save seems to me more pertinent. If the answer is "earning money" - well, money is an unreliable thickener. Sure only those who have drunk neoliberal KoolAid unto indigestion could so uncritically apply the language of capitalism to time - something to be spent and wasted, rather than experienced.
IV.
One reason (I think) why landscape design is the most interesting of arts is, as Daryl Morrison has pointed out, because it is the only art which is experienced in four dimensions - including time. That is to say, how a garden changes over time is as much a point of the work as its color or shape or smell. The garden always changes; it grows and it dies. It is problematic and slippery in a way that must horrify the man who plunks down $160 million for his Picasso. Weeds and drought and mere maintenance will lay ruin to your landscape as quickly as any stock market can tank, again and again, day in and day out, year after year after year.
V.
I woke up early this morning, excited for the day to come (which is not something I often say during the week), stepped outside, and found that the year had leapt, precociously, into September. And first I felt excited, and then cheated. - Cheated that my summer had passed, that I had spent it in the service of something that was a job rather than a cause or calling. I imagined my imaginings of months past: the Baptisia australia and Echinacea grown clumpy in the front yard, the tendrils of clematis twinning around the wrought iron, my Indian gates grown heavy with climbing hydrangea on the back patio. A month ago, I stuck plastic pots of perennials in the front garden, intending to plant them. And none of it has happened, and all these months have passed; and what, I thought angrily, have I got to show for it? What do I have for all the time that I've spent?
We live in an age that lionizes the successful, and that further confuses success in business with wisdom. Thus, as I noted today, we confuse the fastest man in the world with the best athlete. (When even the first to finish is not always the fastest.)
II.
Take that miserable misanthrope and the subject of fawning biographies and biopics, inane articles, and subpar historical television series. He might once have inspired Ebenezer Scrooge - if Dickens had rated him worth mentioning. He will not be remembered (by other than the likes of me) in a single brief century, and will have contributed nothing to ensuring that there is anything at all to remember. Only sycophants could call this genius.
III.
The biggest luxury, I am told, is time. And time passes, as we all know; but such a statement tells us nothing at all about its value; time is the tree endlessly falling in the forest. (Prehistoric time means something, but for millennia meant nothing to anyone - so I might sum up my sister's studies and my own.) Innumerable articles talk about how the wealthy and successful achieve their success through a singleminded on their goals and an allocation of their time to only the most important things. Certainly it's true that money can spare us time doing activities that we often define as tedious: laundry, shopping, waiting in line, housecleaning, cooking, commuting, dog-walking, child-rearing, tending to our infirm elderly. But the question of what we are we doing with the time that we save seems to me more pertinent. If the answer is "earning money" - well, money is an unreliable thickener. Sure only those who have drunk neoliberal KoolAid unto indigestion could so uncritically apply the language of capitalism to time - something to be spent and wasted, rather than experienced.
IV.
One reason (I think) why landscape design is the most interesting of arts is, as Daryl Morrison has pointed out, because it is the only art which is experienced in four dimensions - including time. That is to say, how a garden changes over time is as much a point of the work as its color or shape or smell. The garden always changes; it grows and it dies. It is problematic and slippery in a way that must horrify the man who plunks down $160 million for his Picasso. Weeds and drought and mere maintenance will lay ruin to your landscape as quickly as any stock market can tank, again and again, day in and day out, year after year after year.
V.
I woke up early this morning, excited for the day to come (which is not something I often say during the week), stepped outside, and found that the year had leapt, precociously, into September. And first I felt excited, and then cheated. - Cheated that my summer had passed, that I had spent it in the service of something that was a job rather than a cause or calling. I imagined my imaginings of months past: the Baptisia australia and Echinacea grown clumpy in the front yard, the tendrils of clematis twinning around the wrought iron, my Indian gates grown heavy with climbing hydrangea on the back patio. A month ago, I stuck plastic pots of perennials in the front garden, intending to plant them. And none of it has happened, and all these months have passed; and what, I thought angrily, have I got to show for it? What do I have for all the time that I've spent?
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