"A plumb-line dropped through time": Summer reading

A Sanderson Morris print, the type of pattern that covered Laing’s childhood sofa

I spent my summer on a break from writing, at the kindly suggestion of my editor. That gave me more time for reading and for listening to audio books, which I can’t do without. When I am able to read for pleasure I usually turn to fiction, and this summer I had time to indulge. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was a highlight and is still careening through the chambers of my brain.

But it was Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise that resonated most with me, with the writing I’m doing now and the seedling ideas I am nurturing for the future. Laing’s book is at once a memoir, a work of literary criticism, a study of colonial legacies, a call to environmental action, and a meditation on art and art making, all folded into a thick description of one particular place: the garden in Suffolk they (Laing) set out to restore. I love Laing’s long, appropriately florid lists of flowers and how history and criticism blossom out of their gritty labor among roots, thistles, and thorns. In turning over the soil, Laing uncovers new ways of addressing some of society’s greatest predicaments.

I tried to read without marking up the pages but finally gave in, dog-earing and underlining as I went. I’m fascinated by how Laing thinks through the intersections of time, place, and perception. “Knowledge itself is a function of place,” they say—a simple enough phrase but so full of potential. If I grew up on the prairie and you grew up in the jungle, our truths would be distinct from each other but equally valid. Why do we so often fail to see that?

My favorite metaphor came mid-way through the book. Via an old family photograph, Laing discovers a chain of connections that locate a 17th-century utopian movement for land rights, the politically inspired designs of William Morris, and their own youthful anxieties on the patterned cushion of a sofa in their childhood home. It’s a “plumb-line dropped through time,” they write, summing up this overlay with sharp clarity. All at once we can visualize the episodes of history and memory that lie on top of one another and appreciate their enhanced meanings, like the notes of a chord that vibrate more fully when pressed together.

I would steal this phrase as the title of my own stratigraphic history of the Crypta Balbi block in Rome if it weren’t so specific to the work of surveyors and builders. Perhaps I can find an equivalent metaphor among the tools of the archaeologists. Suggestions, anyone?