Christopher Schooler
@scarymcleary
Christopher Schooler
@scarymcleary
The moral drama here gets to the core of human existence. Notice that the passage says that Eve saw the fruit as “desirable for gaining wisdom.” Satan was not just selling Eve the best fruit in the garden, but something more fundamentally appealing. He was telling Eve that if she ate the fruit, she would be independently wise. The promise was
... See more‘No! You will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil’. The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, and that it was desirable for the knowledge it could give.
He who requires
From us no other service than to keep
This one, this easy charge: - of all the trees
In Paradise that bear delicious fruit
So various, not to taste that only Tree
Of knowledge, planted by the tree of Life;
So near grows death to life, what’er death is,
Some dreadful thing no doubt; for well thou know’st
God hath pronounced it death to taste
... See moreAnd should I at your harmless innocence
Melt, as I do, yet public reason just,
Honour and empire, with revenge enlarged
by conquering this new world, compels me now
To do what else, though damned, I should abhor.
Ah! Gentle pair, ye little think how nigh
Your change approaches, when all these delights
Will vanish, and deliver ye to woe;
More woe, the more your taste is now of joy;
architects are now taught to design houses, not homes, thus contributing to the uprooting that feeds into our growing inability to genuinely connect with the world. There is a “poetics of home”—linked to memory, emotions, dreams, identity, and intimacy—that functional architecture and “modern living” have foreclosed
“Into this wild Abyss
The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave—
Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds,-- ”
The desert/colonialism
Loss of natural world
“And I asked myself about the present:
how wide it was,
how deep it was,
how much was mine to keep.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’