The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

After being thrown from the garden at midnight by two strong unseen hands, First Adam wakes to find himself shameful and covered, and looks over at Pretty Evey-baby, whose own figleaf wrapdress only serves to heighten his excitement; under an audience of starsouls shining ancient light, he rustles leaves and plows a furrow and plants two seeds; a gasp and a smile and then a premonition of mortality shakes through Kadmon like a windstorm.

Afterwards, sitting on a hard rock, glumly looking at his helpmate sleeping, thinking back to that applebrandy she’d made for him (had he asked her to do it, he couldn’t remember now, that didn’t sound like something he would do), that forbidden fruit from Etz HaDa’at, No-Longer Kadmon, Simply Madam I’m Adam now, looks out at the long dark cursed land, undone, unmade, no cities, no streets or roadsigns, and thinks of all the work him and his mewlings have yet to do.

He looks back eastward one last time-like, towards Edenville 001, the Old Happy Haunting Grounds, (walking in a dark leafy garden, always feeling like some great raincloud was glancing over his shoulder, whispering at him in capital letters); he can just make out the luminous fireglow that sits between the legs of two mountains framing the pass.

You can’t go backwards, A.K. muses, only frontwards, and he thinks of the reluctant dirt waiting his still soft hands. He thinks of a bed he’ll one day lie in. First time ever, he sits awake all night, first ever insomniac, looking at Eveybaby and crying without a reason.

Everyone seems to misread Plato, taking his Republic for fact when in fact it is fancy, a gedankenexperiment, and what does he build, the broad-shouldered one, after chasing Homer and the honeyless drones from the city?

What is justice, Broadback? Just doing what you do, babyface, do what you do, and don’t do what you don’t do, there ain’t nothing to it; let the trader trade, and the guardian guard, and the ruler rule, and all will be well.

But here are some others, dispensed with by So Crates:

Definition 1: Returning debts.

Giving everybody their just deserts, good to your friends, and ill to your enemy. Socrates disagrees, however, that the just man would do harm to their enemies.

There is more and more of this, but let’s go here to the problem of the Universal Immortal Soul:

saying that since evil doesn’t harm it, it necessarily lives forever; saying that since it is not of the body it doesn’t die; all that and all that is well and well enough alone, but I counter with my own metahpor, saying you talk about IDEAS, Plato, surely you do, well how ’bout this IDEA — you put water, which has no shape, in a glass, and the water now has a shape: the shape of the glass. Break the glass, and the water loses its shape. Now the shape of the water, that’s a thing of the water; it’s not a thing of the glass; Glass is one thing, water another, and you could write things on the glass, or paint it black, or even crack it without disrupting the shape of the water. Nevertheless, the glass is necessary for the shape of the water to exist. Without the glass, there is no shape.

The soul is the shape of the water, our bodies the glass, our minds, the shape of the glass. There ain’t no free lunch, sister, and your soul is not immortal.