Knowing Beans

To know beans, the idiom says, is to know nothing. Thoreau hoes seven miles of bean rows and decides the idiom has it backwards. Kaag thinks The Bean-Field is the happiest chapter in the book, and the most mystical, and this episode tries to say why. It has his mother in it, a five-foot gardener who talked to the ground until the ground talked back. It has the old word husbandry, and a case for finding the sacred in a sink of dishes. And it ends at a piano, with Franz Liszt and the best answer Kaag knows to the question every reader eventually asks of a beautiful sentence.