P's nostalgia for a Paradise Lost

[Terrance]

P may have read Nietzsche, who can say, but he read Adams
for sure. 


The garden of V. has been "created by north European
tourists in their own image, so German as to be a parody of
home." No God walks or breathes but the inanimate breath is
in the garden and all the daughters of Eve, as the good
doctor explains, call Adam to sin, come in and have apiece
of fruit. The cosmic serpent offers not knowledge, sin,
death, grace, salvation, return, home, but "no return, no
salvation, no Cycle." The world bereft of god the creator is
a world of systems (what does Nietzsche say about systems?),
of gnostic bureaucracies, Adam and Eve and all their
children, connected by the chain, the flesh cord to Eve's
unblemished belly, are deceived not by the serpent or Satan,
but by the formula S I N and their own ingenuities. Man the
creator, he thinks he has made the world, but has only
changed it and he only have knowledge of part of what he has
done. The serpent of Genesis slithered into the Garden with
information. Information is the commodity exchanged for
Eternity, says Katje, but the serpent of the cosmic
dispensation, the cosmic serpent slithers into "our ruinous
garden, already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any
locus of innocence--unless innocence be our age's neutral,
our silent passing into the machineries of
indifference--something the Kekule's Serpent had come
to--not to destroy, but to define to us the loss of..."