Europe's Ominous Spring
Blossoms and birdsong as America prepares to destroy us
According to the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve were exiled from the Garden of Eden after disobeying God’s injunction against eating fruit from the tree of knowledge. In Europe, we have been evicted from an eighty-year-long paradisiacal state of innocence regarding the United States by a hostile Trump administration. J.D. Vance’s violently anti-European and anti-democracy Valentine’s Day speech in Munich sent us clutching in confusion at our collective defense nakedness. Now, European leaders are scrambling to protect our new vulnerability by armoring-up as fast as we can. Given the shocking hatred and contempt for Europe dripping from remarks made by Vance and U.S. defense secretary Pete Hegseth when they thought no outsiders were a party to their exchange on an insecure Signal group chat earlier this month about bombing Yemen (that inadvertently included an incredulous The Atlantic magazine editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg), we need to move even faster lest Europe’s paradise of relatively functional democracy and freedom be pummeled to death.
Spring is here
As spring arrives, as it does every year, the complete indifference of nature to the follies of human aggression and greed astounds me. It is at once a comfort and deeply disquieting. It is a comfort because even as everything else falls apart, the life-affirming force of life on earth, despite our changing climate, is still here, and hallelujah for that. It is deeply disquieting because the birds and the bees continue their ancient courtships, and the sap of life warms in the spreading branches of the trees even as the dead lie at their feet.
Here in my garden in France, as I panic about how fast the world as I have known it my whole life is unraveling, the daffodils are in full bloom. The tulips are up, their bulbous heads swelling with vibrant colors to come. The crabapples are in flower, and the hawthorns are about to start. They will be followed by the already fat buds on the apple, pear and cherry trees, as well as my favorite spring tree blossoms: the delicate peach fairy flowers of our old, gnarled quince tree.
As I read news that gets worse by the day, birds all around me enchant the flowered earth with their song. They herald the dawn and serenade the dusk long after sunset. Adorable little Eurasian Blue Tits and their slightly larger cousins, the elegant yellow-and-black tuxedo-clad Great Tits, snatch seeds then fly up to a branch to peck them open grasped between their tiny little feet. European Goldfinches flit through the old cherry tree about to burst into snowy bloom with their red and black helmets on bodies of brilliant yellow. From high perches in the trees, the male Eurasian chaffinches whoop-whoop-whoop as they lift their iridescent heads, while strong-beaked European greenfinches dive for the bird feeder filled with sunflower seeds they crack and swallow with swift precision. A pair of sparrows have built a tidy nest under an eave above our back door despite our best efforts to stop them. Sighing at the strands of dried grass dribbled over our doormat and the droppings multiplying on our handrail, my husband said after a third day of getting up on a ladder and sweeping the nest away: “I haven’t the heart to tear it out again.” Sparrow life has triumphed.
As the world we took for granted falls apart, I am beginning to understand better the heart-constricting contradiction I’ve only seen from afar as spring unfurled its delicate life-affirming forces upon war-torn lands. Some recent images that haunt me: A lone flowering plum tree in bloom on the edge of a bombed field plowed over by tanks in Ukraine, snow still lying in patches on the muddy ground. A few peeks of edible greens winking from random containers in Gaza amidst endless rubble under which corpses still lie buried. The olive groves in the West Bank systematically hacked and burned, their Palestinian owners forced by sniper fire and groups of settler thugs to abandon their land and the trees they have nurtured for generations – yet returning when they can to plant new saplings. This seemingly futile affirmation of life, of love of the land, of rootedness to a doomed place pinches my heart.
My garden in France: A refuge for how long?
I created my garden in France during the first pandemic lockdown exactly five years ago. I couldn’t go anywhere, and I didn’t have a lot to do. The weather was glorious that spring as the dead multiplied in refrigerated mobile morgues outside overwhelmed hospitals around the world. I was separated from my husband, a doctor, who stayed in Paris to tend to his patients and volunteer at local hospitals. I didn’t know if I would ever see him again. There was no vaccine against COVID. Doctors were dying too.
Out of a wilderness of long-abandoned terrain covered with a deep layer of English ivy and shaded by half-dead, derelict trees, I cleared a few square centimeters of our land at a time using hand tools. Garden centers and hardware stores were all closed, and I ordered the first plants online because I couldn’t go anywhere to buy them. I planted and watered and waited, and my garden grew. It has been my refuge through the unending violence of the years since: first the pandemic, then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, then Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, then the vengeful genocide and destruction that has followed, culminating now with the election of Donald Trump and his blessing of all that and his upending of what is left of what makes the world (partly) civilized. The rules-based international order we thought protected us in the West, even as we knew it didn’t apply to people in Africa, Asia, the Middle East or Latin America, is no more. We’ll see if Europe can salvage some shred of it for itself.
The garden as a protected paradise walled off from a chaotic and violent world is an idea that dates back to the most ancient reaches of Western history and literature. The Latin word for garden, hortus, as found today in “horticulture,” means “enclosure”. So does the English word “garden,” which derives at its most ancient reaches from the Proto-Indo-European gʰerdʰ, which means an enclosure, a fence. Woe be unto those who let down their guard, a word with the same root. Nothing is worse than finding oneself on the wrong side of the garden wall, or the barbarians at the gate suddenly inside.
This ancient idea of the garden as a secure enclosure haunts the Western World. In addition to the parable of the Garden of Eden, it is found in the histories written about the fall of the Roman Empire, its order and its orchards destroyed. It has propelled the worst hegemonic impulses of European civilization: Manifest Destiny, global imperialism, the trope of “civilized” European Jews bringing technical knowhow to a “barren” Palestine and “making the desert bloom,” Trump’s obsession with violently expelling from the American promised land immigrants from what he views as “shithole” countries. America, in his view and that of his white supremacist supporters, is land given by God to white Europeans. Damned straight.
Europe has not comported itself much better in its own garden, creating offshored holding pens for illegal migrants, wringing its hands as thousands have died trying to cross the Mediterranean or the English Channel to a better, safer life. “Europe is a garden,” Josep Borrell, then European Foreign Minister, averred at the European Diplomatic Academy in Bruges in 2022. “We have built a garden,” he continued. “The rest of the world,” he explained, “is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.” Get it? Get it? Borrell was talking about the need for “fortress Europe” to keep migrants from Africa and Asia out. Oblivious to the underlying racism of his statement, he went full in: “the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden.” In other words, the Africans and the Middle Easterners and the Asians trying to reach safety and survival in Europe are reproducing at a faster rate than Europeans are. A politician in ancient Rome talking about the barbarians massing on the edges of empire might have said the same thing. That’s western civilization for you.
Watering Spring Flowers with Blood
There is a scene in Mirza Waheed’s heartbreaking first novel, The Collaborator, that slays me. In the novel, a young man in a remote mountain village in Kashmir is employed by the Indian army to retrieve ID cards and weapons from dead militants, all of them young men, some from his own village, shot as they tried to recross the border with Pakistan back into India. Their bodies lie in a meadow where the young man used to play cricket with his friends, near a burbling stream where they used to swim, in a little valley cupped within the snow-capped Himalayas in a region of India famed for its breathtaking scenery. In one scene, spring has come to the valley bringing little flowers that bloom all around a prone corpse, silhouetting it against the green grass with bright yellow. The flowers, the spring season of rebirth and renewal, nature itself, in fact, are all oblivious to the dead young man.
The scene of dead young Kashmiri boys surrounded by spring flowers made me think of Arthur Rimbaud’s 1870 poem about a young fallen soldier in a valley in France. (English translation below.)
Le Dormeur du val
C’est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière
Accrochant follement aux herbes des haillons
D’argent ; où le soleil, de la montagne fière,
Luit : c’est un petit val qui mousse de rayons.Un soldat jeune, bouche ouverte, tête nue,
Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu,
Dort ; il est étendu dans l’herbe, sous la nue,
Pâle dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut.Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, il dort. Souriant comme
Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un somme :
Nature, berce-le chaudement : il a froid.Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine ;
Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine
Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit.
Here is an English translation by Wyatt Mason, published in The Guardian.
A Sleeper in the Valley
A green hole where a river sings;
Silver tatters tangling in the grass;
Sun shining down from a proud mountain:
A little valley bubbling with light.
A young soldier sleeps, lips apart, head bare,
Neck bathing in cool blue watercress,
Reclined in the grass beneath the clouds,
Pale in his green bed showered with light.
He sleeps with his feet in the gladiolas.
Smiling like a sick child, he naps:
Nature, cradle him in warmth: he's cold.
Sweet scents don't tickle his nose;
He sleeps in the sun, a hand on his motionless chest,
Two red holes on his right side.
Barbarians at the garden gate
In the small village where my garden grows, there is, as in every village and town and city in France, a monument to the village’s boys and men who died in the first and the second world wars. No village son has died in a war on European soil — with the exception of Ukraine — since. General Patton’s troops moved through this area on August 22, 1944, sweeping the Nazi occupiers away before their advance. It is such a cruel irony to think that it is the United States, France’s liberators, that, eighty-one years later, seeks to destroy us and build up the enemy on Europe’s borders, Russia. It is unbearable to see the United States not only back ethnic cleansing and the seizure of land by bloody conquest in Gaza, as it long has, but also to back the seizure of territory in Ukraine. And it is terrifying to realize that the United States of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk is actively seeking to destroy the liberal democracies of Europe so that we too can be subjugated to a new global oligarchic network of corrupt conquerors.
And so, whenever I can as the days lengthen and the temperatures gently rise, I retreat to my garden to watch the spring flowers bloom and listen to the birds sing, to plant new shrubs and ready my potager, to prune and mulch and weed, hoping my garden’s old stone French walls will keep the barbarians at bay long enough that we may find a way to survive the impending debacle.
Turn up your speaker’s volume to listen to the birdsong in the video below.