God is in the Trees.

I read Mark Twain's The Diaries of Adam & Evewith my SDBBE girls. The cover is this one:

and we've discussed who's face that is in the tree. Since when the book opens, Eve has Adam up a tree—he's trying to get away from her because he thinks she talks too much—one of the suggestions was that it was Adam's face.

But the more I think about the story, the more I think it is God's face, watching Adam and Eve as they begin to figure out the world. I think His gaze is compassionate and, perhaps, he is also trying to keep his laughter hidden, because they are pretty funny.

Twain intended it to be a humorous book, but I confess: I don't always appreciate humor. This personality trait has occasioned more than one person to look sideways at me when I'm just sort of, you know, sitting through a funny movie, not really laughing much while said person is guffawing his head off. I've been accused of being a stick in the mud. I don't really know what is wrong with me—it's not that I don't like to laugh. Humor just isn't my favorite genre.

Despite that, I did enjoy this book and it did make me laugh, especially Eve's observations about language. Sometimes the humor made me roll my eyes. Sometimes it annoyed me. And as the end neared, I felt like the humor lessened the story somehow. I wanted to get deeper inside the characters than ridiculosity was allowing me. As the story progresses, Eve learns things, and she has a sort of wisdom born of her innocence, but she's still childlike.

Even though, when she and Adam eat the apple, they are cast out from the garden and death enters the world (the tigers, which were previously strawberry eaters, start eating the horses), Adam and Eve's knowledge doesn't come as a flood. They still learn slowly and by experiments they don't exactly understand. Eve especially loves figuring things out. She believes she was made "to search out the secrets of this wonderful world. . . . I think think there are many things to learn yet—I hope so; and by economizing and not hurrying too fast, I think they will last weeks and weeks." Despite her childlike innocence, she loves learning.

But when death enters their intimate part of the world—when Abel dies at Cain's hand—this is when she learns the bitter part of knowledge. Until Abel dies—until days after his death, when Eve finally realizes that this, this cold sleeping body that won't awaken is death—she is trying to gain knowledge. After she knows death, she has obtained knowledge, wisdom, and the sorrow that comes from both.

I think of her character in the story, explaining what she knows about a thing as basic as air:

By a series of experiments we had long ago arrived at the conclusion that atmospheric air consisted of water in invisible suspension; also that the components of water were hydrogen and oxygen, the proportion of two parts of the former to one of the latter and expressible by the symbol H₂O. My discovery revealed the fact that there was still another ingredient: milk. We enlarged the symbol to H₂OM.

(On the same page we are told that Adam has figured out that 6 times 9 are 27, and that cows make milk by condensing it from the air through their skin.)

They almost  have things figured out. They have the right pieces, hydrogen and oxygen, 6 and 9. They just don't know how to fit their pieces of knowledge together. They draw completely wrong assumptions from their experiences.

Contrast that to the Eve we meet after Abel's death. She doesn't say this, but I realized it: she didn't only lose Abel. She lost Cain, too. That wide variance of bitterness that knowledge brings us! This knowledge changes her; she is no longer innocent because her knowledge is no longer theoretical. It is personal.

And she cannot understand it.

She has these pieces of knowledge she has gained from her experiences. Death has entered the world. Her first son killed her second son. God does not stop bad things from happening. Sorrow doesn't go away. But she doesn't know how to understand the pieces, what they mean, how they fit together. What is being made.

They drove us from the garden with their swords of flame, the fierce cherubim. And what had we done? . . . We did not know right from wrong—how should we know? We could not, without the Moral Sense? . . . But to say to us poor ignorant children words which we could not understand and then punish us because we did not do as we were told—ah, how can that be justified? We knew no more then than this littlest child of mine knows now with its four years—oh, not so much, I think. Would I say to it, "If thou touchest this bread I will overwhelm thee with unimaginable disaster, even to the dissolution of thy corporeal elements," and when it took the bread and smiled up in my face, thinking no harm, not understanding those strange words, would I take advantage of its innocence and strike it down with the mother-hand it trusted? Whoso knoweth the mother-heart, let him judge if I would do that thing.

This is the Eve I wanted to know. I wanted to know her suffering, not because I want her to suffer but because everyone suffers. What do we do with the suffering? How do we put the pieces of our knowledge into a meaning we can grasp? Eve can't see the meaning within her sorrows. She questions God and His motivations, and this makes me feel better about my own questions, my own doubts and failures at understanding. Her conclusion, unspoken but suggested in her words, is that God is unfair to do what He did.

It is just the same as her conclusion about the milk in the atmosphere. She has knowledge but cannot see from God's perspective. She can only see from her own and so arriving at the real conclusion is difficult. Eve is not sitting with God in the tree. None of us are. We only have our pieces of knowledge gained from our experiences, and we stumble. We puzzle and recalculate and leave the box of pieces in dark corners when they seem impossible to assemble. We cannot always make sense of them.

This, I believe, is universal to all of us, not just Eve. This world, the one with death and sorrow and betrayal and unemployment and poverty and medical emergencies, tries to teach us. It gives us the pieces. But since we're all down on the ground, living our lives instead of looking at them, we can't always comprehend the knowledge we are gaining. It comes slowly. We don't always understand.

But neither did Eve. and I think God, looking down from his tree, was not offended by her questions. I think he knew she just didn't understand yet. At least, that is what I hope, both for Eve and for myself. Because it is so easy for me to make the wrong assumptions. To assume that my sorrows happen only as punishments, for example, and that if I were a better person I would have fewer. I don't quite have God's perspective yet. But, like Eve, I am doing what I can while I live to figure things out.

Comments

[wendy]

Wow, Amy! I read this when I was in late highschool or early college, and I don't think I got nearly as much out of it as you have. I've actually been wanting to read it again for some time, but hadn't gotten around to looking for it (thought it was in my Twain anthology, but it's not). What I remembered was the humorous parts, some of which also annoyed me, so now I am particularly looking forward to reading this with a deeper attitude. I love your thoughts. Thank you for covering the "diary" with so much depth.

[Lucy]

This book sounds like the exact kind of book I want/need to read. I love humor/flawed characters and insight on spiritual truth. I’ve never even heard of this Twain book.

I think this may be my favorite book review I’ve ever read.

[Isabel]

One more reason to love our little book club.

I was the second one in our group to read it and I just found it light and funny. I remember thinking that they almost had it figured out, but I didn't go quite as deep as you did. Having you in the book club makes me a better reader/thinker. I appreciate you and your willingness to share your knowledge. (I hope we are assigned closer to each other on this next round so I can read more of your comments.)

[Apryl]

Wow Amy, you are good. You found way more in the story than I did. I second Isabel. I'm so glad to have your perspective in our group!