Heidegger’s point, so construed, is that there is serenity, and therefore happiness, in caring for living things in response to their needs and demands. I suggest, however, that Heidegger’s thought extends well beyond this point. The ordinary German word Gelassenheit indeed refers to serenity, and Heidegger does not want us to ignore that meaning. But in his writings, the expression also has the sense or 'releasing' or 'letting be'. A person who is gelassen is not only serene, but is letting something be, appear, become present; indeed, the reason, for Heidegger, that this person enjoys such serenity is that he or she is not imposing, not dictating how things shall be. Similarly, the word 'inconspicuous', in Heidegger's later writings, indicates something other than being hidden or obscured in the obvious way that features of the earth or soil, to which the gardener must attend, may be. In fact, he uses the word to describe the very 'ground’ of all things, of the world: something that is not itself noticed, but is the condition for there being anything to notice. The serene gardener who 'releases' and cares for the products of the earth, therefore, exemplifies or embodies the relation of co-dependence: the relation, in Heidegger’s vocabulary, between a human agency that 'releases’ things and the inconspicuous 'ground' of the world that presences for human beings.

Heidegger's poem should be taken in conjunction with a remarkable lecture he gave in 1951, 'Building Dwelling Thinking'. Building, in Heidegger's sense, includes, as I noted earlier, cultivation. And cultivation, in his sense, is less the 'making [of] anything’, than a caring for, a 'preserving and nurturing', as when the gardener 'tends the growth that ripens into its fruit of its own accord'. Heidegger argues that we do not, as conventionally assumed, ‘dwell because we have built [and cultivated|’; rather, 'we build [and cultivate]... because we dwell'. 'Dwelling' is his name for what is, or at any rate should be, 'the basic character of man's being’. An enlightened or 'authentic' human life is that of 'dwelling’. Clearly, by 'dwelling', Heidegger does not only mean living somewhere, rather than nowhere: to dwell is to live somewhere, but in a certain way. What this way is, is suggested by the etymology of the German word wohnen, which Heidegger traces back to words meaning peace, freedom, sparing, and preserving. In effect, to dwell is to 'remain at peace' through freeing or sparing, and then caring for and preserving, things. To free things is to allow them to be experienced as the 'gifts’ they are, to allow the world to become present for us through our engagement with it, but without our imposing upon them alien purposes. In other words, the authentic
dweller is gelassen: he or she serenely 'lets be'.

The poem and the lecture, then, combine to present an image of gardening or cultivation as a practice which, engaged in with an appropriate sensibility—-engaged in 'thinkingly', as Heidegger would say—-embodies more saliently than any other practice the truth of the relation between human beings, their world, and the 'ground’ from which the 'gift' or this world comes. In Heidegger's poem, as in Cézanne's paintings of the same man, the gardener Vallier becomes the peculiarly appropriate embodiment or symbol of a serene life led in attunement to truth. People who are able to recognize him as this symbol are on their way to being able, as well, to recognize why The Garden is distinctive and why The Garden matters.

Pp. 158-161

¶ 1:18 PM