All My Friends Are Fictional’s Reviews > The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise > Status Update

“Eden is a place of infinite abundance and possibility, where someone else owns the land, where adventurers plunder and dispossess, where labour is ordained and never-ending, where there are bosses and enforcers, where eviction is an omnipresent threat and at the last a tragic reality. It sounds a lot like Earth.”

“Satan is exactly the kind of rebellious and undesirable reject displaced onto the colonies. ... At the same time, he's a coloniser himself, a 'great adventurer' plotting the invasion of Eden, who betrays and forces into servitude its naked and innocent native inhabitants, and invites his own relatives, Sin and Death, to take up residence in their stead.”

“Does language follow events, or do ideas already formulated in language shape and drive the way things happen? The story of Eden is lodged right at the heart of colonial endeav-ours. The desire to seize it, to claim and possess a paradise of new resources, was among the major drivers of colonisation. But Eden also served as a justification, a God-given excuse note for the brutal work.”

“Money equals security, of course; education, status, a home. But after a certain point, what are those profits for? I mean this question seriously: what could you actually do with such a superfluity of wealth? … I wonder what drives billionaires now in their relentless pursuit of capital. The impulse to mercantile accumulation': is that an answer, or does it just restate the question?”

“I prefer to think of gardens as dream-works, the result of intensely personal creative labour, but … they're also status symbols and adornments, a way for money to announce its presence in a more comely or displaced form. But where does the money come from? … It was a garden of empire, and like all such places it came at a cost so terrible its reverberations are still being felt.”

“His [John Clare] knowledge was another way of saying his familiar ground, the place he knew, but it also intimates … that knowledge is itself a function of place, in which one's capacity to make sense of things, to generate understanding, is a product of being in some way rooted and at home, and that, even more strikingly, this sense of home is reciprocal: that one doesn't just know, but is known.”