Word: edens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Southern writers, only the greatest of them, William Faulkner, had the courage to examine the true paradox of the South-the julep-sipping Southern gentleman who bought and sold human beings. The Agrarians ignored the dominant fact of their history: that their "New World Eden" fed upon an evil far greater than the industrialization they lament...
...vision of the Hudson River school of painting ?the brooding serenity of turquoise skies, patriarchal clouds and trees, very still, doll-like people (white and red), infinite promise, potential self-deception and, above all, perfect containment?the individual and the land, man and God locked in a snakeless Eden. James Fenimore Cooper wrote a novel, Satanstoe, about such a place, an ideal America in which everyone ruled his own vast estate, his own civilization. Whether or not Reagan sees Rancho del Cielo or Pacific Palisades as Satanstoe, his dream of the New World is as old as Cooper...
...Hearst did in San Simeon) or to display the rarest species. (After seeing Lionel Rothschild's Japanese garden in London, the Japanese Ambassador was said to remark: "We have nothing like this in Japan.") Versailles, the model of gardening for so many big spenders, must have had Eden as its model, as a place at once disciplined and open-ended. That is the way the rich would have nature: apparently free yet under the thumb. They would have their animals the same way, which is why they are often attended by clawless panthers and gaga-looking bears...
...gods created men because they were bored, said Kierkegaard, so evidently the rich do likewise. They start out shimmying with hope and wind up hung over, believing with Baudelaire that the world will end by being swallowed up in an immense yawn. Their gardens are Candide's, not Eden's. Ever present at the creation, they find it wanting, and ask for sympathy in their autobiographies...
...would crack the glass panes that protected his images, in homage to the cracks in Duchamp's Large Glass. But the effect was much more violent, since-in a piece like Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery, 1943-it suggested the rupture of a sanctuary, an attack upon Eden. The glass pane of Cornell's boxes, the "fourth wall" of his miniature theater, is also the diaphragm between two absolutely opposite worlds. Outside, chaos, accident and libido; inside, order, sublimation, memory and peace...