Weekend Update (Sunday Edition): Design
When I look at the photograph, I think how skilled a photographer really has to be in order to make a picture that captures the beauty of a high spring afternoon beneath uncertain skies. On top of that, the few wisteria blossoms still drooping languorously from the pergola at the Conservatory Garden had faded to a dirty white. Kathleen was disappointed, and I felt guilty for having spied a beautiful display of wisteria two weeks ago, when Ms NOLA pointed it out to Quatorze and me as we left a restaurant. Now that I have seen the glorious flowerings of New York’s shrubs and fruit trees for almost thirty years, it is just about impossible to rouse myself to go to look at them on their schedule rather than my own. It’s partly that I’m simply not a naturalist.
When I look at the fountain in the picture, and the arches of the pergola, I see signs of intelligent design —intelligent human design that makes sense of the chaos in which some people inexplicably find the hand of a god. Perhaps they’re right. I should only hope that no human plan should be so psychotically disorganized as plant life tends to become only meters away from the Garden’s gardeners’ attentions. God, maybe; but intelligent god — inconceivable! Can a thoughtful mind really see intelligent design in life untended by human beings? As for the idea that human beings are the products of intelligent design — it absolutely beggars intelligence.
Wednesday last, the ladies of the Central Park Conservancy raised millions of dollars by showing up for lunch beneath a tent that stretched across the lawn. I don’t know how such fundraising works, but that comes of being too clever by half. Once upon a time, the ladies of the Park would have been godspouting moralists more concerned with rooting out fallen women than weeds. It’s to be prized that this is no longer so. I promise to become civil about God as soon as I’m sure that I won’t ever hear again about the intelligence of a divinity who would cover this vista with kudzu within a year or so of human neglect. Lock this god up in a church, where his ideas of regeneration won’t burden and wreck the vitality of the men and women around me.