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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The earth is not a dead, mute landscape but an eloquent, living being. Sometimes it just takes a spade, a packet of seeds, and a pair of sturdy boots to realize it.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han spent three springs, summers, autumns, and winters in his secret garden in Berlin, devoting himself to daily gardening in all weathers. For Han, gardening is a form of silent meditation, a lingering in stillness. It gives you a different sense of time. Every plant has its own time that is specific to it, and the garden is a space in which these multiple temporalities overlap and cut across one another. The longer he worked in the garden, the more respect he developed for the earth and for its enchanting beauty.
Gardening taught him what care for others means. Each organism has its own consciousness of time passing; each organism lives in its own micro-universe. Step by step, Han receded from himself and the world, moving closer and closer to an exuberant, divine nature which we are increasingly in danger of losing.
Through this rich meditation on plants, soil, gardening, and time, Han unfolds a way of relating to and tending the earth that is in sharp contrast to the brutal, incessant exploitation of our planet that we see all around us today.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Quote
Preface
Note
Winterreise
Notes
Winter Garden
Notes
Time of the Other
Notes
Back to the Earth
Notes
Romanticizing the World
Notes
Winter-flowering Cherry
Notes
Winter Aconites and Witch Hazel
Notes
White Forsythia
Note
Anemones
Note
Camellias
Willow Catkins
Notes
Crocuses
Notes
Plantain Lilies (Hosta)
On Happiness
Note
Beautiful Names
Notes
Victoria Amazonica
Notes
Autumn Crocuses
Notes
Diary of a Gardener
31 July 2016
7 August 2016
12 August 2016
23 August 2016
19 September 2016
29 September 2016
17 October 2016
27 October 2016
18 November 2016
27 November 2016
3 December 2016
12 December 2016
24 December 2016
9 January 2017
19 January 2017
29 January 2017
27 February 2017
2 March 2017
17 March 2017
19 March 2017
21 March 2017
2 April 2017
5 April 2017
9 April 2017
15 April 2017
23 April 2017
2 May 2017
9 May 2017
14 May 2017
18 May 2017
26 May 2017
8 June 2017
12 June 2017
14 June 2017
17 June 2017
19 June 2017
21 June 2017
25 June 2017
30 June 2017
1 July 2017
10 July 2017
12 July 2017
17 July 2017
20 July 2017
21 July 2017
23 July 2017
25 July 2017
11 August 2017
15 August 2017
21 August 2017
25 August 2017
29 August 2017
3 September 2017
20 November 2017
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Quote
Preface
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
1. Winter jasmine, Jasminum nudiflorum
2. Ice flower, Flos glacialis
3. Arrowwood, Viburnum bodnantense
4. Liverwort, Hepatica nobilis
5. Winter-flowering cherry, Prunus subhirtella autumnalis
6. Winter aconite, Eranthis hyemalis
7. Witch hazel, Hamamelis
8. Camellia, Camellia japonica
9. Fragrant plantain lily, Hosta plantaginea
10. Japanese anemone, Anemone hupehensis
11. Autumn crocus, Colchicum autumnale
12. Strawflower, Xerochrysum bracteatum
13. Monk’s pepper, Vitex agnus-castus
14. Korean perilla (Deulkkae), Perilla frutescens
15. Panicled hydrangea, Hydrangea paniculata
16. Christmas rose, Helleborus niger
17. Kabschia saxifrage, Saxifraga kabschia
18. Paeony, Papaver paeoniflorum
19. Red mulberry, Morus rubra
20. Caper, Capparis spinosa
21. Bougainville, Bougainvillea
22. Chameleon plant, Houttuynia cordata
23. Japanese toad lily, Tricyrtis japonica
24. Chinese beautyberry, Chimonanthus praecox
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144
In Praise of the Earth
A Journey into the Garden
Byung-Chul Han
With illustrations by Isabella Gresser
Translated by Daniel Steuer
polity
Originally published in German as Lob der Erde. Eine Reise in den Garten © by Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin. Published in 2018 by Ullstein Verlag.
This English translation © Polity Press, 2025.
English translation of Robert Schumann’s Melancholy (published in The Book of Lieder by Faber, 2005) © Richard Stokes.
Polity Press Ltd.65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press Ltd.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6790-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025932451
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee:
Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.
Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the LORD hath wrought this?
Job 12: 7–9
Preface
One day, I suddenly felt a deep longing, even a pressing need, to be close to the earth. Thus, I decided to spend time gardening every day. For three full years, throughout spring, summer, autumn, and winter, I worked in my garden, which I called Bi-Won (Korean for ‘secret garden’). On the heart-shaped sign that my predecessor had left on a rose arch, it still says ‘Dream Garden’. I left the sign in place. My secret garden is, after all, also a dream garden, because there I dream of the coming earth.
For me, gardening was a form of silent meditation, a lingering in stillness. It made time linger and smell. The longer I kept working in the garden, the more respect I developed for the earth, for its enchanting beauty. I am now deeply convinced that the earth is a divine creation. The garden helped me gain this conviction, helped me gain this insight which for me has become a certainty, has taken on the character of evidence. Evidence originally meant seeing. I have seen it.
The time spent in the flourishing garden has made me devout again. I believe that the Garden of Eden has existed and will exist. I believe in God, the creator, in this player who always begins new games and thereby renews everything. Human beings, as his creation, are obliged to join in the play. Labour, or performance, destroys the game. It is a blind, blank, dumb doing.
Some of the lines in this book are prayers, confessions, even confessions of love to the earth and nature. There is no biological evolution. Everything is the result of a divine revolution. I have experienced it. Biology is ultimately a theology, a teaching of God.
The earth is not a dead, lifeless, mute being but an eloquent living being, a living organism. Even a stone is alive. Cézanne, who was obsessed with Montagne Sainte-Victoire, knew about the secret and the particular liveliness and vigour of rocks. Laozi teaches:
The world is a spiritual vessel and cannot be run.
One who runs it destroys it; one who seizes it loses it.1
As a spiritual vessel the world is fragile. We today are brutally exploiting it, running it into the ground and destroying it completely.
From the earth emanates the imperative to spare it [sie zu schonen], that is, to treat it well [sie schön zu behandeln]. Sparing [Schonen] is etymologically related to beauty [mit dem Schönen verwandt]. What is beautiful obliges us, even commands us, to spare it. What is beautiful must be treated carefully [schonend]. It is an urgent task, an obligation of humankind, to spare the earth because she is beautiful, even magnificent.
Sparing calls for praise. The following lines are hymns, hymns of praise to the earth. Like a beautiful song of the earth, this praise of the earth should ring out. For some, however, it should read like evil tidings, in the face of the major natural disasters that are visited upon us today. These disasters are the earth’s angry response to human recklessness and violence. We have lost all veneration for the earth. We no longer see or hear her.
Note
1.
Laozi,
Daodejing
, no. 29 (MWD 73), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 61.
Winterreise
I am particularly fond of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (Winter journey). The song I have sung most often is ‘Dream of Springtime’.
I dreamed of bright flowers
such as blossom in May;
I dreamed of green meadows
and the calling of birds.
And when the cocks crew,
my eyes opened;
it was cold and dark,
on the roof the ravens croaked.
But on the window panes
who had been painting leaves?
Well may you laugh at the dreamer
who saw flowers in winter.1
Why would I begin a book on gardens with a reference to winter and Winterreise? Does winter not signify the end of time spent in gardens? I neither intend to present my dreams of springtime nor to follow the example of someone like Wilson Bentley (who took 5,000 photographs of snow crystals) and turn my attention to ice flowers.
The Berlin winter is terrible, even devastating. The flames of the inferno would be more endurable than this endless wet and dark coldness. All light seems to have been extinguished.
It is nothing but winter,
winter chill and savage.2
When faced with the endless grey of a Berlin winter, there arises – in the depth of winter time – the metaphysical wish for a bright, flowering garden.
Bertolt Brecht’s ideal garden, unfortunately, has nothing to say about the cold winter months. It only blossoms from March to October:
By the lake, deep amid fir and silver poplar
Sheltered by wall and hedge, a garden
So wisely plotted with monthly flowers
That it blooms from March until October.3
Apparently I lack this wisdom of Brecht’s gardener, because I have decided to create a garden that blooms throughout the year, from January to December. I prefer metaphysics, the metaphysical desire, to the wisdom of the gardener, his ‘letting go’.
Notes
1.
Franz Schubert,
Winterreise
[Winter journey], song no. 11: ‘Dream of Springtime’. Quoted after Hampsong Foundation, transl. William Mann, available at
https://hampsongfoundation.org/resource/winterreise-texts-and-translations
.
2.
Ibid., song no. 18: ‘The Stormy Morning’.
3.
Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Flower Garden’ (from
Buckow Elegies
), in
Poems
, London: Methuen, 1976, p. 439.
Winter Garden
The same metaphysical desire animates Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. It is a book of mourning, a book performing the work of mourning. It invokes Barthes’s deceased mother with whom he had lived all his life. The book is based on a photograph which Barthes ceaselessly circles, embraces, even adores, but which is not reproduced in the book. It shines through its absence. This photograph shows his mother as a five-year-old girl in a Winter Garden.
Lost in the depths of the Winter Garden, my mother’s face is vague, faded. In a first impulse, I exclaimed: ‘There she is! She’s really there! At last, there she is!’1
Barthes distinguishes between two aspects of a photograph: studium and punctum. Studium relates to the information that can be extracted from it, making it possible to study it. The punctum, by contrast, does not provide information. Literally it means ‘punched point’; it is derived from the Latin ‘pungere’ (to stab). The punctum affects and shakes the observer.
For me, the punctum of Camera Lucida is the photograph of the Winter Garden that is not reproduced, with his mother, his only beloved, in it. I now see the Winter Garden double. It is a symbolic place of death and resurrection, a place where the metaphysical work of mourning takes place. Camera Lucida, before my eyes, is a flowering garden, a bright light within the wintry darkness, life amid death, a celebration of reawakening life amid today’s deadly life. A metaphysical light transforms the chambre noir into a chambre claire, a bright Winter Garden.
Roland Barthes loved Romantic song. He took singing lessons. I would have loved to hear him sing. Often I feel that Barthes is singing when writing, or by writing sings. Camera Lucida is actually a kind of Romantic cycle of songs with forty-one songs/chapters. Song number twenty-nine is called ‘The Little Girl’.
Camera Lucida, to me, sounds like a Winterreise, a winter journey. Searching for his mother, his beloved, Barthes travels through the ‘realm of the DEAD’. Searching for the truth of the mother, he embarks on an endless wandering.
Nor could I omit this from my reflection: that I had discovered this photograph back through Time. The Greeks entered into [the realm of] Death backward: what they had before them was their past. In the same way I worked back through a life, not my own, but the life of someone I love.2
The ‘Winter Garden Photograph’, he writes, ‘was for me like the last music Schumann wrote before collapsing, that first Gesang der Frühe which accords with both my mother’s being and my grief at her death’.3Die Gesänge der Frühe (Songs of dawn), a cycle of five short piano pieces, is Schumann’s last piano work. Three days before his attempted suicide, he called them a ‘collection of musical pieces which describe the sensations during the approaching and growing morning’. Initially, Clara Schumann did not know how to react to these pieces: ‘Very original pieces again, but difficult to comprehend, there is such an altogether peculiar mood in them.’
Die Gesänge der Frühe is suffused with the longing for a newly awakening, resurrected life. These are songs of mourning. A deep melancholy can be heard in them. Death and resurrection are the themes.
When, when will the morning come,
When, O when!
That will free my life
From these bonds?
You my eyes,
So clouded by sorrow!
Saw only torment instead of love,
Saw no joy at all;
Saw only wound on wound,
Agony upon agony inflicted on me;
And in my long life,
Not a single cheerful hour.
If only the hour
Would finally,
Finally arrive,
When I could no longer see!
When, when will the morning come,
That will free my life
From these bonds?4
A mysterious aura surrounds the first Gesang der Frühe
