Gardens and Stories
I'm reading Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition by Robert Pogue Harrison. In the chapter on Boccaccio's Decameron, he has this to say:
"The stories ... like the garden settings in which they are told, have intervened in reality … if only by testifying to the transfiguring power of form. By recasting reality in narrative modes, they allow what is otherwise hidden by reality’s amorphous flow of moments to appear in formal relief, just as a garden draws attention to the aesthetically determined relations of things in its midst. That is the magic of both gardens and stories."
"The stories ... like the garden settings in which they are told, have intervened in reality … if only by testifying to the transfiguring power of form. By recasting reality in narrative modes, they allow what is otherwise hidden by reality’s amorphous flow of moments to appear in formal relief, just as a garden draws attention to the aesthetically determined relations of things in its midst. That is the magic of both gardens and stories."
James Golden