The Met Gala's Theme – J.G. Ballard's Garden of Time – Is a Perfect Pick to Highlight The Barbarism Around Us.

The 1962 short story is well worth reading today.

When J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story, The Garden of Time, was announced as the theme for this year’s Met Gala several months ago, I printed off a copy. It seemed oddly thoughtful for such a plastic event. In all likelihood, it was an entirely superficial decision. J.G. Ballard’s garden has flowers. Flowers are pretty. Time is crazy. That sort of thing.

But whether the organizers know it or not, The Garden of Time is the perfect choice for this year’s Met Gala, which takes place just a short walk from Columbia University.

It’s a story about Count Axel and his wife, who live in a Palladian villa, with a garden full of “time flowers” which can be plucked to rewind the world around them. On the horizon? An army “composed of a vast confused throng of people, men and women, interspersed with a few soldiers in ragged uniforms, pressing forward in a disorganised tide.”

It evokes the opening scenes of Jean Raspail’s revered and reviled book Camp of the Saints, in which hundreds of thousands of migrants descend upon Europe, as the natives observe, waiting—and in some cases hoping—to be overrun.

Mozart rings out over the grounds as Axel and his wife continue to break the stems to defy the hordes. But the flowers are finite, and the inevitable occurs:

Heaving and swearing, the outer edge of the mob reached the knee-high remains of the wall enclosing the ruined estate, hauled their carts over it and along the dry ruts of what had once been an ornate drive. The ruin, formerly a spacious villa, barely interrupted the ceaseless tide of humanity. The lake was empty, fallen trees rotting at its bottom, an old bridge rusting into it. Weeds flourished among the long grass in the lawn, over-running the ornamental pathways and carved stone screens.

In the end, statues of the Count and Countess are the only things left. Time consumed them, and the wailing mob occupied the villa’s ruins.

It’s also reminiscent of the lines from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, included here, which in turn inspired my favorite series of paintings: Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire, pictured below.

The Garden of Time is an almost perfect metaphor for the barbarism we have allowed to corrupt civilization.

The Met Gala, taking place close to the heaving and swearing hordes in New York, offers poetic irony. And whether Anna Wintour meant it or not (likely not), she will tonight host a living play about the destructiveness of mass migration and cultural relativism, slap bang in the middle of Manhattan.