'…our reluctance to let history’s realities petrify us underlies much of what makes human life bearable: our religious impulses, our poetic and utopian imagination, our moral ideals, our metaphysical projections, our storytelling, our aesthetic transfigurations of the real, our passion for games, our delight in nature...If ever history were to become everything, we would all succumb to madness…[Yet] more often than not, in Western culture it has been the garden, whether real or imaginary, that has provided sanctuary from the tumult of history...Human gardens, however self-enclosed their world may be, invariably take their stand in history, if only as counterforce to history’s deleterious drives.

It is because we are thrown into history that we must cultivate our garden…History without gardens would be a wasteland. A garden severed from history would be superfluous.'

Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition
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