Earthquakes and Gardens

This summer I read and savored Virginia Burrus’s Earthquakes and Gardens: St. Hilarion’s Cyprus (2023). It’s really good and is a must read for anyone even casually interested in Cyprus and quality academic writing (which, honestly, should be just about everyone).

I’m not going to review this book here largely because it’s not the kind of book that would reward a review. It’s also short! 156 pages. If you think it sounds great, go and read it!

I will offer a few random observations on the book, though.

First, I’ve come to appreciate books that do a lot with little. This book qualifies for that as it develops a series of meditation on place, time, memories, ruins, and even faith on the basis of the very limited evidence for St. Hilarion’s time in Cyprus from Jerome’s Life of Hilarion. These meditations are short essays that take Jerome’s Life as a point of departure and engage in “geocritical” reflections on the kinds of landscapes (gardens and earthquakes) introduced in Jerome’s work.

Second, this book starts and ends with the author’s personal experiences. It begins with the Loma Prieta earthquake that shook the Bay Area in 1989 and ends with her experiences during the pandemic. The book interleaves Burrus’s experiences on Cyprus, her encounters with art, and the often personal engagements with the work of other writers to show how Jerome’s modest outline of Hilarion’s time of the island nevertheless has the capacity to inspire new ways of thinking. This book is an advertisement for the potential of close reading to produce new knowledge.

Third, this book embodies “pandemic scholarship.” Its personal tone, deeply incisive readings, and circumscribed physical horizons evoked our collective tendency to turn inward during the social isolation of the pandemic. In this way, Burrus’s work, with its close and reflective attention to a single text, parallels the ascetic practice of Hilarion whose quest for solitude led him on a journey from Palestine to Cyprus. Burrus’s isolation while both less voluntary and undoubtedly less severe nevertheless prompted the kind of intense reflection on a text that had parallels with Early Christian ascetic practice. In other words, even as asceticism and pandemics limited the physical possibilities of travel and experience, they also offered the potential of more intensive and reflective readings of texts. 

This short notice of this book in no way does it justice. At just over 150 pages, though, it feels like such a small commitment for the reader (and its beauty and sincerity offer such a great reward) that I’d urge anyone interested in Cyprus, who endured the pandemic, and who appreciates the potential of small texts read in expansive ways to pick up a copy and give it a read.