humility 101

Most of [Czech author Karel] Čapek’s com­men­ta­tors con­sider The Gardener’s Year a minor work, but as Ver­lyn Klinken­borg remarks in the intro­duc­tion to the Mod­ern Library Eng­lish edi­tion of 2002, “most stu­dents of Čapek believe gar­den­ing is a sub­set of life, whereas gar­den­ers, includ­ing Čapek, under­stand that life is a sub­set of gar­den­ing.“
–Robert Pogue Harrison

My first mean­ing­ful expo­sure to the work of Čapek came through Leoš Janáček’s amaz­ing 1925 opera, The Makrop­u­los Affair, which is based on Čapek’s play of the same name. I sup­pose you could call it a sci­ence fic­tion opera: a young woman becomes the lab­o­ra­tory rat of her alchemist father, who is tasked by Emporer Rudolf II to devise a for­mula that will extend his life by three cen­turies. When given the potion, the daugh­ter at first drops into a coma. How­ever, when she wakes up, she truly has been trans­formed into being able to live another 300 years. In liv­ing through those extra years she becomes increas­ingly detached from her orig­i­nal human­ity as she is forced to leave one mor­tal hus­band after another and loved ones fade around her. At the end of the opera, even though she is in pos­ses­sion of her father’s for­mula for the elixir that would allow her to keep extend­ing her life, she refuses to con­coct the drink and chooses humanity–and death.

It’s a pow­er­ful tale with echoes all the way back to the Odyssey, where Odysseus declines eter­nal life in favor of his known, mor­tal one, back in Ithaca with the fam­ily and friends he knows and loves. Also, Čapek, ever rooted in the earth and dis­trust­ful of the quick, shal­low plea­sures of “progress,” uses the play to express his dis-ease with where unthink­ing appli­ca­tion of the tech­nolo­gies that were explod­ing around him would lead the human race.

I bring all this up because I’ve been read­ing Gar­dens: An Essay on the Human Con­di­tion, by Robert Pogue Har­ri­son. One of the chap­ters is devoted to Čapek and his work, The Gardener’s Year. The quote at the begin­ning of this post comes from that chap­ter, as does this sec­ond by Čapek him­self, in an extended quote:

I tell you, to tame a cou­ple of rods of soil is a great vic­tory… And if you have no appre­ci­a­tion for this strange beauty, let fate bestow upon you a cou­ple of rods of clay–clay like lead, squelch­ing and primeval clay out of which cold­ness oozes; which yields under the spade like chewing-gum, which bakes in the sun and gets sour in the shade; ill-tempered, unmal­leable, greasy, and sticky like plas­ters of Paris, slip­pery like a snake, and dry like a brick, imper­me­able like tin, and heavy like lead. And now smash it with a pick-axe, cut it with a spade, break it with a ham­mer, turn it over and labour, curs­ing aloud and lamenting.

Then you will under­stand the ani­mos­ity and cal­lous­ness of dead and ster­ile mat­ter which ever did defend itself, and still does, against becom­ing a soil of life; and you will real­ize what a ter­ri­ble fight life must have under­gone, inch by inch, to root in the soil of the earth, whether that life be called veg­e­ta­tion or man.

All this may sound a lit­tle dense and dif­fi­cult going, but oth­ers of Harrison’s quotes from Čapek’s work show it to be incred­i­bly funny at the same time. I have plenty of books lined up that I need to read, but this one is mov­ing to the front of the queue.

July 07 2008 | Categories: everything • gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: • • • • | 3 Comments »