"And the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning..."

I've had the book of Genesis, specifically Eden, on the brain of late. My extremely talented sister Mary is currently playing Eve in Children of Eden, a musical so loosely based on Genesis it's maddening. I'd like to write a whole separate post dealing with that subject, but in the meantime, I'm really enjoying her run. She brings a wide-eyed childishness to Eve that's almost reminiscent of Wonderland's Alice, and, of course, her singing is beautiful.

It's funny how we, as a species, just can't seem to shake Eden. There's an aiming for Eden in everything we do, even in the books we write; fiction is overflowing with Edens. Who could forget Aslan singing Narnia into being in C.S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew, or an entire celestial body in a state of grace in Out of the Silent Planet? But it's not only the religious authors--the more skeptical John Steinbeck moved the book of Genesis to the Salinas Valley in East of Eden, which he wholeheartedly regarded as the best of all his works. Samuel Taylor Coleridge set up his poem Kubla Khan as an intoxicating dream of a pleasure-garden, then snapped it forebodingly off just as the forbidden fruit is ingested: "For he on honeydew hath fed/And drunk the milk of paradise."

They're not all so serious. There are comedic Edens. Evelyn Waugh famously said of P.G. Wodehouse's Blandings Castle series, "The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled." Every single book sees numerous impostors infiltrating its delectable grounds and, of course, getting likened to serpents. (Just to top it all off, the love interest in the second book is named Eve.)

And wait a second, this very blog owes its name to an amusing Eden--the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare's As You Like It. Ironically, the only way to get there is by being exiled. A famous speech in the middle of it runs, "Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,/The season’s difference, as the icy fang/And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind..." But oddly enough, the version in the folio ran, "Here feel we not the penalty of Adam." Most likely a typo, but you never know.

I leave you with Hans Christian Andersen's take, The Garden of Paradise, the tale of a young man whose obsession with finding Eden becomes quite literal.

[Edit: Was just reminded that Nicole Baart, one of my favorite authors, has a novel called Sleeping in Eden slated for publication in April 2013! We don't know a thing about it yet...but we can wait.]