eden

I__ scared of him. I__ disgusted by the vile monster he becomes, this beast he lets out. But I still love him. I__ still do anything for him. I can__ just turn off my heart. I want to, I do, but I can__. I love him with everything I have and I hate myself for it. Because it__ wrong to love him, I know. It__ so wrong.

I stood like Adam in his lonely gardenOn that first morning, shaken out of sleep,Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves,Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.

If there were only success in your life, you would not learn anything. Leadership is experience and you are still young. You still have much to learn about our people and war; it should not come easy to you. If it did, you would be robbed of life's most valuable teacher.

The Serpent, to my interpretation, was pain.

Though I__ proven to be a wretched, foolish woman, I knew deep in my broken heart that God was still just as good and loving as he__ been the moment he plucked a rib from Adam__ side and used that bone to give me life.

And you're right, I do love you Eden. I will follow you into eternity, or until after this weekend when we all die gruesome, painful deaths... But with every breath I have left, I will use it to love you. Because, Eden, I want this... You; I want you more than life, more than anything. There was a time when I didn't think I was strong enough to face you again, or what is between us. I was too afraid of the heartache, of being shattered again. But now, it doesn't matter, nothing matters except you. I will take an eternity of hardship, of war or fighting my father, or anything, just to hold your love again. You are everything to me, my sun, my moon, the air I breathe. Nothing exists accept you. I love you.

June laughs. "I have to say, you look better than most people I see. I've heard a lot about you.""I hear about you a lot too," Eden replies in a rush, "mostly from Daniel. He thinks you're really hot.

There is a common superstition that __elf-respect_ is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.

I took that mint because I wanted to. I wanted to remember who I was. I wanted to remember my family. Most of all, I wanted to remember you. I wanted to remember what we are together, and how we got to that point. I wanted you to know I remember all of those precious moments. And if I don__ make it through this, I wanted to go knowing I love you. I wanted you to know I remember why I love you.

How can there ever be any serious expectation of living in paradise, if one cannot behave appropriately, or be trusted to respect and honour all life?

For a thousand years,and then a thousand more_I will love you.

He stands on the stone table and selects a large fig, bites into the skin, then opens it with his fingers. He thinks of a woman's sex, ancient and eternal, no young girl would have such gritty sweetness. Was this not perhaps the fruit that got Adam and Eve thrown out of Eden? Who would want to give up an unblemished state of immortality for the insipid apple?

Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!

Freeways flickering; cell phones chiming a tuneWe're riding to Utopia; road map says we'll be arriving soonCaptains of the old order clinging to the reinsAssuring us these aches inside are only growing painsBut it's a long road out of Eden(...)Behold the bitten apple, the power of the toolsBut all the knowledge in the world is of no use to foolsAnd it's a long road out of Eden

I am old enough to enjoy a bit of nostalgia, but wise enough to know that there haven't been any "good ol' days" since Eden (the garden, not the prime minister).

There's a little war in progress here. There won't be anything left of the place if it goes on at this rate." (But it's hard to feign innocence if you've eaten the apple, he reflected.) "And it looks to me as if it is going to go on, because the French aren't going to give in, and certainly the Arabs aren't, because they can't. They're fighting with their backs the the wall.""I thought maybe you meant you expected a new world war," he lied."That's the least of my worries. When that comes, we've had it. You can't sit around mooning about Judgement Day. That's just silly. Everybody who ever lived has always had his own private Judgment Day to face anyway, and he still has. As far as that goes, nothing's changed at all.

Curiously, growing Papaver somniferum in America is legal__nless, that is, it is done in the knowledge that you are growing a drug, when, rather magically, the exact same physical act becomes the felony of __anufacturing a controlled substance._ Evidently the Old Testament and the criminal code both make a connection between forbidden plants and knowledge.

Let us not, however, exaggerate our power. Whatever man does, the great lines of creation persist; the supreme mass does not depend on man. He has power over the detail, not over the whole. And it is right that this should be so. The Whole is providential. Its laws pass over our head. What we do goes no farther than the surface. Man clothes or unclothes the earth; clearing a forest is like taking off a garment. But to slow down the rotation of the globe on its axis, to accelerate the course of the globe on its orbit, to add or subtract a fathom on he earth's daily journey of 718,000 leagues around the sun, to modify the precession of the equinoxes, to eliminate one drop of rain--never! What is on high remains on high. Man can change the climate, but not the seasons Just try and make the moon revolve anywhere but in the ecliptic!Dreamers, some of them illustrious, have dreamed of restoring perpetual spring to the earth. The extreme seasons, summer and winter, are produced by the excess of the inclination of the earth's axis over the place of the ecliptic of which we have just spoken. In order to eliminate the seasons it would be necessary only to straighten this axis. Nothing could be simpler. Just plant a stake on the Pole and drive it in to the center of the globe; attach a chain to it; find a base outside the earth; have 10 billion teams, each of 10 billion horses, and get them to pull. THe axis will straighten up, ad you will have your spring. As you can see, an easy task.We must look elsewhere for Eden. Spring is good; but freedom and justice are beter. Eden is moral, not material. To be free and just depends on ourselves.