A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010

Candide in Sanssouci
The ideal reader

“I only wanted to see what the garden was like.”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 2

OUR FIRST IMPULSE IS TO decipher what we sense around us, as if everything in the universe carried meaning. We try to decode not only systems of signs created for that purpose — such as alphabets, hieroglyphs, pictographs, social gestures — but also the objects that surround us, the faces of others and our own reflection, the landscape through which we move, the shapes of clouds and trees, the changes in the weather, the flight of birds, the spoor of insects. Legend has it that cuneiform script, one of the earliest systems of writing we know, was invented by copying the footprints of sparrows in the mud of the Euphrates five thousand years ago, prints which must have seemed to our remote ancestors less casual markings than words in a mysterious and divine language. We lend moods to the seasons, significance to geographic settings, symbolic value to animals. Whether as trackers, poets, or shamans, we have intuited in the unfolding of nature an endless book in which we, like all other things, are written, but which we are also compelled to read.

If nature is a book, it is an infinite book, at least as vast as the universe itself. A garden then, is a scaled-down version of that universe, a comprehensible model of that endless text, glossed according to our restricted capabilities. According to the Midrash, God put man in the Garden of Eden “to dress it and to keep it,” but “that only means he is to study the Torah there and fulfill the commandments of God.” Expulsion from the Garden can be understood as a punishment for willfully incorrect reading.

Gardening and reading have a long association. In 1250, the chancellor of the cathedral of Amiens, Richard de Fournival, imagined a book-cataloguing system based on a horticultural model. He compared his library to an orchard wherein his fellow citizens might gather “the fruits of knowledge” and di vided it into three flowerbeds corresponding to three major categories: philosophy, the so-called lucrative sciences, and theology. Each bed in turn was divided into a number of smaller plots (areolae) containing a summary of the book’s subject matter. Fournival speaks of “cultivating” both his garden and his library.

Not surprisingly, the verb cultiver retains in French these two meanings: that of growing a garden and that of becoming learned. The tending of one’s garden and the tending of one’s books require, in the sense of the word cultiver, equal devotion, patience, persistence, and a serviceable sense of order. Cultiver is to seek the truth hidden in the apparent chaos of nature or a library, and to render visible its attendant qualities. Furthermore, in both cases, truth is subject to review. Gardener and reader must both be willing to shift purpose according to the exterior or interior weather, to yield to the consequences of new discoveries, to reorganize, redistribute, reconsider, redefine, according not to overwhelming absolutist notions but to individual and quotidian experience.

To a certain extent, the French Revolution is the consequence of a loss of confidence in absolutes. Rather than maintain that universal metaphysical categories rule human lives, or that ideas override experience, or that figures of divine power have the right to rule over individuals, the philosophers of the French Enlightenment preferred to argue what Immanuel Kant was later to call “the categorical imperative”: that every human act, at its finest, should in principle become a universal law. A splendid, if impossible, achievement, concerning which a century later Robert Louis Stevenson would note: “Our duty in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in the best of spirits.”

Voltaire would have agreed. Voltaire, above all the philosophers of the Enlightenment, wished us to act as if we, and not a Divine Commander, were accountable for the consequences of our acts. For him no human action is independent of another. “All events are linked in the best of all possible worlds,” the philosopher Pangloss tells Candide at the end of his adventures. “Had you not lost all your sheep in the good land of Eldorado, you would not be here eating pistachios and candied lemons.” To which Candide wisely answers, “Well said, but we must tend to our garden.”

The garden is then our business, the stage of our essential occupations, nature transformed into the setting in which we are to accomplish our allotted human tasks. The wise Turkish dervish whom Candide consults at the end of his adventures knows or cares nothing of what goes on in the world (for in stance, that two viziers and a mufti have been strangled in Constantinople), nor is he concerned with metaphysical questions about the reason for our existence or problems of good and evil. “What then are we to do?” asks Pangloss anxiously. “Shut up,” answers the dervish. Shut up and act. “Man is born for action, like fire tends to rise and stones to fall. Not to be occupied and not to exist is all one to man,” argues Voltaire against Pascal. And farther on: “Let us be consoled for not knowing the relationship that might exist between a spider and the rings of Saturn, and let us continue to examine that which lies within our reach.”

To examine nature, we must therefore render it accessible, lend it a shape and a symmetry that can be grasped by our senses. Faced with the conceptual order of a garden, we can pretend or assume to read it: allot significance to its beds and partitions, garner instruction from its layout, deduce a narrative from its sequence of plantings.

In this sense, every garden is a palimpsest, design over design, season after season. Let us consider, as an example, the garden through which Voltaire wandered during his three years of grace in Prussia: the royal park of Sanssouci. Sanssouci began life in 1715 as a kitchen garden planted on a hill outside Potsdam under the orders of Friedrich Wilhelm I, and it was sarcastically known as the Marlygarten in reference to Louis XIV’s costly garden at Marly. In 1744, Friedrich’s son Friedrich II added on a vineyard and six parabolic curving terraces for plum and fig trees and vines, each terrace divided by twenty-eight glazed windows and sixteen yew trees trimmed in the shape of pyramids. A year later, the terraces were extended southward by a level space of eight flowerbeds and punctuated by a fountain over which rose a gilded statue of the goddess Thetis and her attendants. Two sphinxes by Franz Georg Ebenhech were added a decade afterwards on the far side of the moat, leading to a plot of agricultural land, and still later a marble parapet topped with a dozen sculptures of children was erected to separate a Dutch garden of terraced beds from a rond-point and its fountain. Beyond this area, the king installed a Neptune Grotto and an Obelisk Portal, each with a small flower parterre, while to the west he erected a Chinese teahouse, a delightful folly designed by Johann Gottfried Buring between 1754 and 1757.

Flowerbeds, allées, parterres, fountains, sculptural groups, hedged paths combine to form a complex landscaped narrative: but in the beginning, the garden of Sanssouci had no other purpose than to express a certain simplicity as a place both pleasing and useful, a garden like the one through which God walked (Genesis tells us) “in the cool of the evening,” so peaceful, that it was here where Friedrich II stipulated (in several wills) that he wished to be buried. The model of such a garden is very ancient: in the oldest Mesopotamian texts no distinction is drawn between “orchard” and “garden,” since the aesthetic function was not necessarily differentiated from the utilitarian one.

At Sanssouci, however, habitation succeeded cultivation. A year after the establishment of the orchard and because of the beauty of the scenery, the king had a summer palace built on the site to take advantage of the delightful view. What was to have been merely a model of Eden was overwritten with new architectural episodes and their attendant subplots, complicating and multiplying the itineraries and vistas. In the following years, more buildings were added (such as the gardeners’ houses and the orangery, later transformed into guest lodgings), and to the north of the Schloss Sanssouci mock ruins were erected following the principle of baroque metaphors in order to hide the water tank that fed the park’s fountains. The stone metaphors hid too well their core meaning: only once did the king enjoy the displays of dancing water since the cumbersome mechanics that worked the jets did not become fully operational until the next century, when a steam engine was installed to fuel them. But by then the king was dead and his intricately conceived garden was no longer in fashion. Three kings later, Friedrich Wilhelm IV redesigned Sanssouci in the style of the Italian landscaped park we see today. The older scripts, however, can still be glimpsed beneath the more recent plots, groves, and pathways. As in a palimpsest, the original text never quite disappears.

When Friedrich II installed his orchard in Sanssouci, he was thirty-two years old. Eight summers earlier, as a young man of twenty-four, he had begun a correspondence with Voltaire, asking him to become his guide. “In the entire universe,” wrote Friedrich gushingly, “no exception could be made of those of whom you might not be the teacher.” Voltaire was almost twenty years the monarch’s senior and the most celebrated philosopher in Europe at the time; Friedrich was only the heir apparent to a secondary European monarchy. Friedrich admired Voltaire’s ideas, his prose, his poetry, his drama, and above all, the fact that he was French. Years later, in 1880, Friedrich was to publish a pamphlet (in French, like all the thirty-one volumes of his extensive writings) titled De la littérature allemande, des défaults qu’on peut lui reprocher, quelles en sont les causes, et par quels moyens on peut les corriger in which he brands his native tongue as “à demi barbare.” Kultur was, for Friedrich, unhesitatingly French.

Friedrich’s youth had been, to say the least, rebellious. His father had wanted to mold the prince into his own image of a Soldatenkönig, a hard-bitten warrior and statesman. When the experiment failed, he tried to force him to resign his rights of succession. Finally, after one humiliation too many, Fried-rich attempted to flee to Paris with his friend Lieutenant von Katte. The two young men were caught, Friedrich was locked up in his room, and von Katte was executed under the prince’s window. Friedrich then began to see the merits of dissembling. He bought himself some peace by pretending obedience to his father, inspecting the troops and marrying a niece of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa whom he afterwards visited only once every twelve months, on her birthday. For the few years preceding his accession, he lived in the newly rebuilt Palace of Rheinsberg, reading, writing, composing music, playing the flute, and corresponding with Voltaire. If he had modeled his life on a literary figure, it would have been Shakespeare’s Prince Hal. Voltaire was his Falstaff, and as Hal with Falstaff, Friedrich parted from his master when he chose to truly assume his role as king. The break between the two men occurred in 1753, three years before the start of the Seven Years’ War, which was to grant Friedrich the appellation “Great.”

But from 1750 to 1753, Voltaire was Friedrich’s guide, while Friedrich lent Voltaire the illusion that the myth of the philosopher-king could indeed become reality. With promises of money and applause, Friedrich lured Voltaire to Sanssouci. Here Voltaire, like his host, led a quiet, regulated, retired life, as if following the midrashic principles of Eden. “What do you do here at Sanssouci?” someone was once asked. “We conjugate the verb ’to be bored,’” was the answer. Voltaire worked at his writing and at pretending to be ill. He was almost sixty years old.

Without truly being conscious of it, Voltaire had granted Friedrich a philosophical justification for being who he was. The small palace of only twelve rooms, with its library, its picture gallery and music room, but above all the gardens, carefully plotted and artfully kept, lent the king the illusion of power over all the forces of nature, allowing him, rather than to explore the vast and secret rules of nature, to render familiar the unfamiliar, that is to say, to translate and simplify, to abridge, explain, and gloss. To ensure an uninterrupted continuity between the palace and the garden, Friedrich had, against the advice of his architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, dispensed with a ground story. In this way, the notions of outside and inside broke down and intermingled, the inside becoming part of the wilderness of nature, the outside domesticated by its connection to the interior.

Friedrich had intuited that we render a place artificial merely by being in it. Our presence (as strollers or as residents) humanizes a landscape, and while topiaries and manicured lawns, patterned flowerbeds and staggered terraces frame that which is essentially alien and wild, these artifices simply confirm the original hierarchies of Eden, when Adam was made lord of all flowers and all trees, with one notorious exception. A cultivated place showed the hand of man — so much so that visitors at Sanssouci sometimes complained that they couldn’t see the trees for all the gold and marble. Wilderness, instead, is that place, as God says to Job, where the rain falls on the earth “where no man is.” It exists by contrast to our presence; it is a closed book whose text does not come into being until it is opened and read.

At about the same time and in other places, gardeners were discovering that same notion. Horace Walpole, writing about the landscape artist William Kent, noted that “he leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden.” Kent did what in another context Marcel Duchamp was to do centuries later: he put a frame around the readymades of nature. He called the wilderness a garden simply because he was there to look upon it, and merely redistributed what he found for better effect in a procedure Alexander Pope was to call “landscape painting.” A rock was moved, a watercourse diverted, but the general aspect of the garden remained decidedly “wild.” Kent’s masterstroke took place in 1735, when, under the patronage of Queen Caroline, he planted a dead tree in Richmond Gardens. The gesture was directly equivalent to the use of unattributed quotations in so much eighteenth-century writing, for instance in the work of Laurence Sterne.

In contrast with Kent’s “recuperation” of the wilderness in England, Friedrich’s Sanssouci was a model of French artifice, a product of human reason. Kent’s wilderness was, in some sense, a response to the English Puritans’ abhorrence of the geometrical forms in gardens, to the logical constructions that, according to them, prevented the soul from finding its narrow path. Sanssouci, on the other hand, obeyed the baroque impulse born with the Counter-Reformation, the intuition that truth can best be revealed in hiding, in the elaborate volutes and spirals that lend presence to a concept by enclosing it. Looking towards the palace, a visitor would have been able to follow the careful lines of terraced gardens which look, especially in winter when the trellises are visible, like rising rows of bookshelves in a dream library; the viewer would probably reflect for a moment on the circumscribed passages of laid-out parterres, enjoy the convoluted swirls that surrounded the central fountain, remember the stories of the ancient gods illustrated by the sculptures. In his Essai sur les moeurs, written at Sanssouci, Voltaire had noted that “it is not in the nature of man to desire that which he does not know” and that therefore he required “not only a prodigious length of time but also felicitous circumstances to rise above his animal state.” Sanssouci allowed the visitor to understand how nature could be reasoned, could be read through its unfurled texts revealed in apparently coded flowerbeds and deliberately arranged views, could be reflected in poetical compositions and musical scores, could be understood through baroque emblems and artifices, thereby encouraging an ardent desire for natural knowledge. At least, that was the intention.

But Friedrich became disillusioned with Voltaire’s teachings, or with Voltaire the man, or with that part of himself that as a youngster had believed that there was wisdom in art beyond the scope of power and accomplishments in the spirit that no imperial armies could conquer. He had opposed his personal vanity to that of his father, the sophisticated, cultured identity of the heir apparent to the brutish, ambitious identity of Friedrich I. Like Prince Hal, Prince Friedrich suddenly realized that “The tide of blood in me / Hath proudly flow’d in vanity till now: / Now doth it turn and ebb back to the sea, / Where it shall mingle with the state of floods / And flow henceforth in formal majesty.” Of such majesty Voltaire wanted no part even though in his Memoirs he was to confess: “I could not but be attracted to him, because he was witty, graceful, and also because he was a king, which always proves very seductive, given our human weakness.”

According to Novalis, when Adam was sent out of Eden, the shattered remains of Paradise were scattered all over the earth, and that is the reason why Paradise is so difficult to recognize. Novalis hoped that these fragments would somehow be brought together, its skeleton filled out. Perhaps the young Friedrich had entertained the same hope since Voltaire had taught him to believe in the uttermost importance of philosophy and art that sought, in a practical, empirical way, to know the world and the human condition. But the older statesman Friedrich had little faith in such cultured notions. For the student prince, gardens, like books, were ordered fragments of Paradise, reflections of what we know of the world, artificial creations that were nevertheless alive and fruit bearing, ordered spaces for our imagination to roam and for our dreams to take root, the means by which our arts and crafts transcribed the story of creation. If all flesh was as grass, as the Bible told us, then the warning could also be read as an exultation, as the revelation that we too had in us some of the grass’s ability to come into being summer after summer, to conquer death by covering the dirt-filled graves, to lead a multitudinous, exuberant, and orderly existence in leaves as numerous as those of the books in the Universal Library. For the middle-aged King Friedrich II, only the political order seemed to matter.

And yet something of Voltaire’s teachings must have taken secret root. Four years after the victory of Rossbach that won Friedrich the epithet “Great,” the king, aged thirty-nine, reverted to his early literary ambitions and composed a poetic fable which he called “Le Conte du violon” (The Tale of the Fiddle). Jotted down in Breslau, far from the quiet and beauty of Sanssouci, in the last days of 1751, it tells the story of a gifted fiddler who is asked to play on only three strings, then two, then one, and finally on none, with the obvious results. The fable ends like this:

Through this story, if it please you,

May you now this wisdom glean:

That however skilled you may be

Art falls short without the means.