Genesis’s iconic narrative of the creation of the Cosmos is quickly followed— “layered” might be more accurate to say—with another creation story, one far more intimate, focused on a symbolic, poetic, and yet particular place: a garden where a man named Adam and a woman named Eve arise. Much, of course, has been written about Eden and these two.
In Mark Twain’s clever book, The Diaries of Adam and Eve, which reads just like it sounds, he satirically explores the differences between man and woman, while at the same time delivering a beautiful elegy about how despite—or perhaps because of—these differences, we come to love and experience the love of one another. Twain’s slim volume, read in conjunction with Genesis 2, powerfully reminds us that of all the gifts God bestows upon us, perhaps the most sublime is the capacity we have to love another human being over a single wild and wooly lifetime and to feel it in return.
Twain begins Adam’s diary with a first comical encounter with Eve:
This new creature with the long hair is a good deal in the way. It’s always hanging around and following me about. I don’t like this. I’m not used to company...Cloudy today, wind in the east; I think we shall have rain. We? Where did I get that word? I remember now. The new creature uses it.
Twain supplies several brief entries about Adam’s experience in the garden before offering an extract from Eve’s far less succinct diary about her own first encounter with Adam, whom she calls “the other experiment:”
I am almost a whole day old now. I arrived yesterday as it seems to me, and it must be so, for if there was a day-before-yesterday, I was not there when it happened...I followed the other experiment around yesterday afternoon at a distance to see what it might be...I realize that I feel more curiosity about it than about any other of the reptiles, if it is reptile.
Twain next offers a delightful account of the naming of the animals from both party’s points of view.
Adam’s Diary: I get no chance to name anything myself as the new creature names everything that comes along...the naming goes recklessly on in spite of anything I can do.
Eve’s Diary: All the week, I tagged around after him and tried to get acquainted. He seems pleased to have me around...it seems to flatter him to be included...During the last day or two, I’ve taken all the work of naming things off of his hands. This has been a great relief to him for he has no gift in that line.
While expressing some annoyance of Eve, Adam’s also intrigued. Part of the attraction comes from his suspicion that she might make him better, happy.
Adam’s Diary: She’s all interest, eagerness, vivacity...when she finds a new flower she must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to it and pour out endearing names upon it...There’s nothing on the planet she’s not interested in...It’s the right spirit. I can see it. It attracts me. I feel the influence of it. If I were with her more, I think I should take it up myself.
Twain goes on, utilizing the source material (more or less) until, following the couple’s removal from Eden, Eve reminisces wistfully.
Eve’s Diary (After the Fall): When I look back at the garden, it is a dream to me. It was beautiful, surpassingly beautiful...and now it is lost and I shall not see it anymore. The garden is lost, but I found him and I’m content. He loves me as well as he can...If I ask myself why I love him, I find I do not know and I do not really much care to know...He is as God made him and that is sufficient...he is well enough just so, and is improving.
Finally, much later, east of Eden, near the end of Eve’s fruitful life, she considers her mortality and deep love for Adam.
Eve’s Diary (Forty Years Later): It is my longing that we may pass from this life together...but if one of us must go first, it is my prayer that it shall be me...Life without him would not be life. How could I endure it?
Twain’s book then concludes with a last breathtaking line.
Reading Eve’s diary at her grave, Adam makes a last entry to it in his own hand:
Eve’s Diary (At Eve’s grave):
Adam: Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.
God—Thank you for the origins of love. Amen.
— Greg Funderburk
- Twain, Mark. The Diaries of Adam and Eve, Prometheus Books, New York, 2000.
