[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
These intros are brilliant.
They're like the great illustration of this principle.
And thank you all so much for coming.
Thank you, Marjorie, for organizing this whole thing.
And thank you for doing all the work.
And it's a really exciting event.
I'm going to read two different things,
a few pieces from a book that just came out called Ours.
And it's about the gardens of André Le Nôtre,
who was a 16th century--
17th century, 1600s garden designer in France.
And he's known as kind of the father of the Baroque garden.
And he was the person who did Versailles,
in particular, a lot of what still remains of the Tuileries.
And all the people that he worked for
were aristocracy or royalty.
And yet, all of the gardens that he designed and the spaces
are now almost all public parks.
So there's this irony that's underscored by the fact that
the word Le Nôtre means ours in French.
So if you were to say c'est nôtre voiture, c'est la nôtre,
that's our car, that's ours.
So I like that irony a lot.
And particularly, writing this book
at the time when more and more things are getting privatized,
like national train systems, or electricity grids,
or these things that are one could
argue extremely important to keep
public to see this history of private property turning
to public on the garden scheme.
I'm going to start with a couple that work
with definitions of the garden.
A garden as between as the articulating tissue
between city and ocean, between building and barren
around a house, a jungle extends a magnet toward a jungle,
a match struck, a tailored knuckle make it useful.
Let it rain between the stilted and the flaming,
the crack in the glaze that lets us
flow out again across a plain.
A garden marks that plane with the first principle.
It paces off precise and hovers cartilage
between road and home.
A mental stable of dressage roses
hovers as a garden is routed half an idea, rending the Earth
unstable, a flying machine with three wings, then five,
then all over the sky in miniature vistas or garden
branches from a fist in bridges.
A garden as a unit of measure.
They adopted the tools of the sea, the astrolabe,
as if the island never came, became the graphometer
of Phillipe Danfrie, 1597, which allowed a line in the mind
to falter on a sum and become a mile,
and aid encasing more precisely the edge cannot retain.
Gardens lie beyond the eye.
The rest is a long walk toward a ship in flames.