Although he doesn’t even know my name, Robert Pogue Harrison is my new best friend. He first won my heart with his book on Forests: the shadow of civilization which shows that the way forests are depicted in art, literature and popular imagination sheds light on the passions, desires and fears of that civilization. Over time, forests have alternatively been portrayed as refuge, horror, public, private, sacred, profane, alluring, repelling, nurturing, and murderous; all of this being much more a window into a society’s collective psyche than the nature of the woods.

Harrison reminds us, for we seem to continually forget, that we would hardly know ourselves without nature. For among all its other attributes, nature is a broad, reflective pond, showing us who we think we are, and what it is we think we are doing here. It is a mirror of our sometimes restless, sometimes peaceful spirituality, bouncing back to us now the enchantment, now the terror, of our existence. There is, therefore, nothing natural in the way we speak about nature. And if we are to truly understand ourselves, we should tend well to the ways we speak of, and behave toward, the physical world around us.

Harrison extends this message about the fluid imaging of nature into his next book, Gardens:an essay on the human condition, which I am only half-way through.

But from the very first page, this book helped cast a new light on one aspect the divergent nature of the two creation stories we find in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. Most often, when the two chapters are compared, we focus on the differing order of creation, the apparently contradictory divine methods and timing used to bring forth man and woman, and the distinct blessing or calling given by God to the first humans.

But Harrison helps point out another distinction: that in Genesis 1 the humans are placed in a world of wilderness while in Genesis 2 the humans are placed in a protected garden.

There is a world of difference between wilderness and garden, each calling forth different practical and spiritual responses. Which is to say, these two stories should not be read as they often are: as competitive, contradictory, or vacillating in their vision of which is the true story of creation or the true representation of the human condition. Rather, they should be read as the warp and weft of the fabric of life, for it is only with both of them, in wilderness and garden, in rawness and refinement, in vulnerability and mastery, as observer and as tender, that the whole cloth of human existence can be woven.

I will speak more of this in a future post, as the lessons of Harrison’s powerful book sink in.