‘Puer aeternus’ in the garden

Abstract

Gardens are fascinating and they are all too easily compared to Paradise. Yet, it seems even more difficult to describe human experience of gardens than to foretell the bliss eternal souls will experience in Paradise. Early recollections of his childhood by Marcel Proust in his novels have offered a glimpse into the construction of emotions in landscape and gardens. They appear as places where time and space share a unique relation, allowing the events of youth to be echoed throughout life when visiting them. This will provide the starting point for a discovery of the role of painters, philosophers and novelists in the social construction of a new bourgeois attitude with regard to gardens in turn-of-the-century France, allowing a search for a new relationship between self-development of children and nature, and introducing an essential difference between the immediate garden around the home and the larger landscape where life awaits them.