A Post Labor Day Meditation

I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing   

Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.

WB Yeats, “Adam’s Curse”

It’s the Tuesday after Labor Day, and, as if on cue, the weather has turned a tad cooler.  The trees outside my second story office are swaying, nodding, trembling in a brisk breeze. In the back yard, morning glory vines have carpeted the Asiatic jasmine with purple flowers while the untended Elaeagnus is broadening its realm and sprouting ugly baldish shoots skyward. 

So this morning, armed with swing blade and hedge clippers, I braved the mosquitos to do a bit of long overdo maintenance, which oddly enough brought to mind Milton’s Paradise Lost where Eve and Adam are tasked by their Creator to tend to the garden’s growth. They must “lop” or “prune” or “bind,” but nevertheless “wanton growth derides” and the garden “tends to wilde” (sic). So, channeling her inner Adam Smith, Eve suggests she and Adam divide their labor, which leaves her isolated and vulnerable to the blandishments of Satan’s forked tongue and phallic charms:

            [The Serpent] Address’d his way, not with indented wave,
            Prone on the ground, as since, but on his reare,
            Circular base of rising foulds, that tour’d
            Fould above fould a surging Maze, his Head
            Crested aloft and Carbuncle his Eyes; 

            With burnisht Neck of verdant Gold, erect^[1]
            Amidst his circling Spires . . . 

This seduction, of course, leads to the fall of humankind, so farewell, delightful gardening, hail back-breaking farm labor.

Thus, Adam’s curse is twofold: death and labor.

Yet, I think that without meaningful labor we humans tend to wither, and how horrible a terrestrial eternal life would be! Just ask Petronius’s Sibyl: 

I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she answered: “I want to die.”^[2]            

                                                                                                Petronius, The Satyricon

Or the old man in Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale”:

            Thus I walk, like a restless wretch,

            And on the ground, which is my mother’s gate,

            I knock with my staff, both early and late,

            And say, “Dear mother, let me in!”

                                                            Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale”

So, we should be thankful for Original Sin. Otherwise, we’d be stuck in a never-ending cycle of gardening, which would delight some of my friends, but is not to my taste.

I’ll give Wallace Stevens the last word:

            Is there no change of death in paradise?

            Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs

            Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,

            Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,

            With rivers like our own that seek for seas

            They never find, the same receding shores

            That never touch with inarticulate pang?

            Why set the pear upon those river-banks

            Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?

            Alas, that they should wear our colors there,

            The silken weavings of our afternoons,

            And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!

            Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,

            Within whose burning bosom we devise

            Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

                                                                        Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”

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^[1] Emphasis mine. But while I’m at it here below, shouldn’t some vice crusader alert Moms for Liberty that this filth is hiding in virtually every high school library in America! 

^[2] “The Sibyl of Cumae was a prophetess in service to Apollo and a great beauty. Apollo wished to take her as his lover and offered her anything she desired. She asked to live for as many years as there were grains in a handful of dust. Apollo granted her wish, but still she refused to become his lover. In time, the sibyl came to regret her boon as she grew old but did not die. She lived for hundreds of years, each year becoming smaller and frailer, Apollo having given her long life but not eternal youth. When Trimalchio speaks of her in the Satyricon, she is little more than a tourist attraction, tiny, ancient, confined, and longing to die.”  from a hyperlink in windingway.org’s hypertext version of TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land”