Adam’s Task

WHEN, I WONDER, DID ADAM PICK HIS FIRST BOUQUET? Was it the moment he awakened with a sore chest and saw Eve standing before him? Was it the minute God told him he couldn’t have her? It was neither.

After all, in paradise this woman he didn’t know but in his bones felt a connection to was surrounded by so many flowers that she would be unimpressed by a mere handful of them.

And besides, he had no discretion, and would be unable to decide what to pick from such a plethora of posies. What effort to choose not just what he liked — for he had been self-centered for quite a while — but to choose what someone else might like. It took imagination, which is a form of will, which he didn’t have.

Compounding his indiscrimant and undisciplined nature was the fact that he had everything he wanted (there was no concept of need except when he looked at Eve), so he only understood grasping. He was rapacious by nature and by God, and his rapacity of course would carry to his possession of Eve. And she, of course, was rapacious as well. One day, then, they were rapacious with each other; and no bouquets had yet been exchanged.

It was then, as tenants who had angered the landlord and been tossed on their ears out the east door of Eden, that things began to change. With the abundance gone, Adam felt sad or empty (after all, he had lost all the seeds of the world by spilling his own), and he looked around at the barren acre he now inhabited, finding a stem of this and a petal of that and a seed of this (no bigger than an eye of the needle), and a leaf of that. As he held the paltry remnants in the palm of his hand, there was a start of memory, of what had been, and a glimmering of sentiment, of how he missed what little he remembered. In that presentiment of loss, the concept of a past took shape.