Welcome back to the new Thinkery. I'm David Barr with me as always. It's my good friend Greg McRaeger. How are you, Greg?
Doing great, David. It's been too long since we've done it just the three of us. You know what I mean? I do know what you mean.
We've moved that a lot. I guess I'm like, it's nice to be back in the saddle with, you know what I mean. I do. How are you doing else?
I'm doing well. I didn't know you could settle up at Hogg. You know what I mean. I don't know who's the Hogg in that.
Sorry. I'm excited. I'm sad a little bit. Our most famous follower has departed this mortal coil.
David, I think you're muted on your mic. You said our most famous follower. He is now. She's a Norma Donald.
He followed us in the last month of his life. I think it was honored. That feels a little bit like a prank. And our good friend Greg McBrayer wrote a remembrance of him.
If you want to read it, go to the New York Times. Is that where you wrote it? Greg? No, it's on the thwart.
I read this New York Times thing and it was almost verbatim. Are you sure you didn't write it there? I read the same piece. It was like all of your arguments.
I was like, man, Greg made it in the New York Times. It's crazy. It was very similar. There's just so many things out there about what one could say.
I didn't mean it in the Times. There was a power. Yeah. There was one error in that New York Times piece besides all the plagiarism.
Come on, Greg. I know you're upset about it. You can tell people how you really feel. You think Greg played you as the New York Times?
Oh, he played you as himself. The author of the Times piece argues that Norm felt contrition over his OJ jokes. I went and I reviewed the clip that he quotes from. It's a tongue and cheek.
It's totally shot. I mean, the tongue is straight through the cheek. It's on the other side of the face. I didn't understand that.
I don't know how he breaks it. It's almost as though one didn't recognize Norm's deadpan delivery. It was unfamiliar with it. I got that impression.
Anyway, what are we doing tonight? This is sort of his... We're doing Mark Twain. One of Norm's favorite authors, according to him.
I think that was not a tongue and cheek remark because I saw he made it several times in different places. It's funny. You must have appreciated him. I was very familiar with the Twain price for American humor.
It's been around since 1998. He's directly tied to comedy. All the great comedians have won. We're doing a specific piece by him.
Twain? That is. That I've always liked. It's called Extracts from Adam's Diary.
I first encountered this. There's an addition called the Bible, according to Mark Twain. It's got a whole bunch of different writings connected to the Bible as well as to Heaven and Hell. You give us a couple of the other ones on every side of the one we're doing.
I'll mention one piece. I'll recommend the piece. Isn't there one where he just floats through space? This is crazy.
He's in Stormfield's visit to Heaven, which is interesting because it's trying to reconcile what we're told of Heaven with what we think we know of the universe. Now, it's his eyes. So how long it would take you to get all the way to... What is that you're drinking?
Because it has a curious... Yeah, that's an... John just colored about it, that fluid that you're drinking. Happy you asked, Greg.
I'm drinking my own urine. And we decided to get back in shape to get really eco-friendly. Yeah. And start eating...
You know, is that really that? What is that? It's a drink, a protein powder by a Navy SEAL named Jaco. And I'm well-thinkable.
It's free advertising. Actually, it's not protein-powered at all. It's a new topic. That's me with that.
No idea. I'm already regretting what I just asked you. Same. So I think it's a good addition.
Who's the other thing? Howard Bates-Hold and Joseph McCulloch. V. Joseph McCulloch?
I guess. I don't know. Sometimes you know people's names. Like, you don't know this person?
You don't know. The traction against is they put a stupid quote by Bill Maher on the cover. One thing I'll say is that... I don't know.
Norman McDonald didn't like him, Greg. Sorry. He didn't know that. But he...
Not the way he attacked Maher attacked God was right. And that's why I think why it's so unfortunate that he's on the cover because... Oh, yeah. ...I think about Twain is that his religious humor is not this kind of vindictive atheism, right?
Or this is presumptive arrogant atheism, which isn't funny really because it takes itself too seriously. His humor is really textually based, right? He starts from the text and he's able to bring out interesting, funny moments that might have happened if you really tried to... Is it vivid imagination?
He has it. It's interesting. It reminds me actually back to the subject of Norman McDonald. I know.
There's probably this is too much norm, but I always saw him live. Oh. And his closing bit was about a man and a pregnant woman at a party. And they've been promised that at this party there will be some cheese sandwiches.
Oh. A man is very upset because there are no cheese sandwiches to be found. Right. And he's complaining.
And he complains a bit. And then Norman starts talking about the woman and how has the man's been complaining. She's been making a flood. And then he complains more in greater detail with a ton of analogies.
This is like going to the store and being promised this and it's not there. And it's just overly overdoing. Each time going back and it gets extended and it's hilarious, but the conceit of the joke struck me was that woman has a sort of special dignity as a bearing children, creating human life. While men just hung up on their petty disputes and most of those never rise above complaining about promised but missing cheese sandwiches.
And it struck me that he might have gotten this from the book of Genesis. When they're kicked out of Eden, man is made to work and his name just remains a man while woman gets a property and Eve and is given the dignity of bearing children in pain. But the dignity and she takes great pride in this as things go. It strikes me that it was almost it was a very pious joke showing how petty sort of an instillied human world can be in light of the greater sort of.
And that's in a way what I think Twain does. This piece is very funny all sorts of little jokes. It was quite touching at the end and it gets out at a sort of humanity. Yeah, Greg, sorry.
David, do you see what's going on here? I figured out what's happening. That our Muslim co-host is trying to, he's from a later groundwork for establishing his piety. You know what I'm talking about?
I think that there's certain institutions. Because you're putting down? No, I got it. Yes, sir.
No, this is not a pious thing for you. Yeah, yeah. Pies for you. That's what I'm starting calling it.
Oh, yeah. For you the pious? I think the pre-I think derives from the word for priest. That only seems appropriate.
Yeah. But let me tell you, my brain is piety. If he's not in humble self-effacement for the other world, but in fatwas and jihad, you will be subject to it. Yeah, he's pied as like something to roll up.
Oh, geez, please. No, but Alex, everything you should have to generally, I totally agree with. I think that's a nice analysis of what Norm's doing, but what Twain is up to. There's none of this cynicism.
I think that's why Bill Maher's brand, he wrote, he directed some documentary. Oh, I watched it. Oh, I checked it. Really?
That's it. That's how it is. Great. So there's this one scene.
You've seen it quite quickly. I saw it years ago. That's it. Yeah.
There's one scene where there's a truck stop for truck drivers. These are guys, 14 hour days, and they're on the road on Sunday, and some of them just want to talk to God. Lord knows what suffering they're going through away from their families. And Mar just comes in and he marks that piece.
Look at these inbreds. They're dumb for believing. Why do you believe in God? I'll destroy you.
But Mar just comes off as a fool. Let's get down to some real business. I really like this piece. I think he brings out the humor in the Bible.
Before we do that, can you just, like, for the listeners at home, for the folks at home, we're reading something called Extra X of Adam's Diary. So just a broad strokes. Like, what is this that we're reading, Alex? By the way, before you do that, I just want to mention, for the folks at home, this is really short, like 20 pages.
I read it on Apple books or whatever. It's sort of an ad, even shorter than that. And you can also, it's on iTunes. There's a free iPod iTunes.
I read it on a project Gutenberg. So I listened to it. My wife and I listened to it. And I read it.
So I'm gonna check it out. I was like, don't do that, baby. I was driving. Oh, okay.
Yeah. So it's very accessible to Google it and find a place to read it. Anyway, what do you have? It's called Extra X from Adam's Diary, translated from the original manuscript.
And there's a... In hieroglyphics, by the way. Yeah. The original was in hieroglyphics, which is a sort of fascinating.
Absolutely. I mean, presumably he found it upstate in New York, right? That's interesting. Yeah.
Everything is related to actual locations in upstate New York. Apparently, he's right by Eden, he's right by Niagara Falls. And he even goes to this other town. I'm forgetting the name of the Reastors of the Tea.
And then Buffalo is hell. It's like it's the real world. It's ugly. So he starts with this.
He says, I translated a portion of this diary some years ago. And a friend of mine printed a few copies in an incomplete form, but the public never got them. Since then, I've desegrated some more of Adam's hieroglyphics. I think he has now become sufficiently important as a public character to justify his publication.
Apparently, Adam just got famous with him, Mark, twain's lifetime. I hear he's becoming very famous now. So it goes through initially day by day and then increasingly broken up in months and even years towards the end. And it goes through a series of episodes.
You get first man's first week upon woman's arrival, which there's a lot of linguistic humor. It's all about after the woman has arrived. And it's almost all about her. And it's really about his reconciliation term.
Because it starts with him being like, who is this? Why is she naming everything? She's not a she at first. She corrects them.
I'm not an Emma she pronoun apparently since time immemorial have been something that we struggle with. But she insists that she's not an edge. She's a she. The very first words of the diary are this new creature.
So it's in it to him. With the long hair. So it starts with their first week together. It doesn't go that well.
So he tries to escape. He's annoying him. She can sometimes keep off the grass. That's my favorite one.
He's naming animals. Am I giving an overview or do you want to just go through it? Oh, sorry. Sorry.
You don't know. He's doing the whole thing. He escapes and tries to return. And then she gets into return.
He then encounters all these other animals. And there's this question of death. He eventually makes a second escape during which the woman actually eats the apple and the world is filled with death. He is finally reconciled to her.
And he eventually gets actually blamed for the expulsion. Anybody's been married. It knows how that goes where you get the blame for your spouse's missus. Sexist.
I said stop as you obviously read into that. Used to wife. Not my fault in the Grey Air households and having anyways. Then they have children.
Well, we don't want to air out dirty lungs. There's children come. And there's a change in women's nature. And there's a long.
I love this part. Inquiry into what kind of animal. Adam engages in it. And he has different hypotheses based on different stages of development.
And then finally after the children are grown to boys. But 10 years old. He must be an able, I guess, about a year younger. He's finally reconciled to life with her.
And says this is actually quite a good life. Better than to be in need. So yeah, I mean the obvious subject matter is his tension with women and his final appreciation for mortality and love in the family. All right folks, today's episode is brought to you by the ancient language Institute where our co-host David Barsman study.
How's Greek coming along David? Learning anything? Yeah, they're the comfort of my own Oikos. Alex, I really that means house.
I've been I've been I've been cussing out my wife and at a Greek, which is wonderful. She doesn't know what I'm saying. I do. And I can't wait to graffiti up my town in ancient Greek and there are all these wonderful applications.
I'm finding it's delightful. But you're yelling at your son, call him doulos. I didn't think that was too nice. No, it's not nice.
But ancient Greek corrupts. And if you're that kind of guy or gal, then sign up and take the class with me. All jokes aside, it's wonderful that the methodology of ancient language Institute is unlike any formal language course I've ever taken. You might want to talk a little bit about it, Greg.
Yeah, Greg. Tell the folks at home. Sure. First, I'll all of a sudden she's in the day, wife is also enrolled.
So she does understand. She's actually graduating top of her class this fall. I'm at the bottom. Yeah, you're at the bottom.
But they actually do have classes still this fall. You can enroll up until August 13th. They have courses in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. And unlike most of the other arrivals that will sort of inundate you with long, drab list of vocabulary words to memorize in charts, sort of declining nouns and conjugating verbs.
They get you reading and writing a language on day one. They offer live online courses to meet your flexible schedule to meet your busy schedule. And last but not least, of course, Alex's favorite part, the Aristotle guarantee. Tell us about the guarantee, Alex.
Okay. Read Aristotle's Nick and Eric, he's makes it pretty clear. There's no happiness in life. But Aristotle's dumb and old.
He didn't live in the age of the ancient language Institute. He's not happy with what you're getting. It's not for you after the first day. If you are not flourishing fully as a human being after studying Greek, Hebrew, or Latin with them.
You get your money back. You get all of it. And be happy in Uranus. And also a certificate from the College of Natural Sleeves.
So go to ancientlanguage.com and learn Greek back to the show. Should we just begin at the beginning? What it was like? Well, yeah, but this doesn't begin at the beginning.
This begins after the beginning. I'm going to begin at the beginning of the word. Yeah. Sorry.
I mean, you brought that up a couple of times. So what are your thoughts on that? I said that kind of glibly, but I did sort of. I mean, it begins ostensibly and I mean, if it's tracking with the Bible at all, it begins in chapter two of Genesis.
So it skips chapter one entirely. And even then the sort of account of chapter two is sort of, obviously, it's not strictly speaking staying on track of the Bible. I guess maybe my first question is first off, I really enjoyed this, but it doesn't begin at the beginning, which means it does leave stuff out. So I mean, you guys have any thoughts on why Twain leaves things out?
Especially, I mean, God. Yeah, God is never referred to, is he? No, the devil. He's.
He's never the devil. The snake is and snake is referred to as speaker, right? Which is that also tracks with the Bible, right? Yeah.
And there is reference to God's command, not to eat of the tree of knowledge, good and evil and what will happen? That's really there. Right. The snake is the only animal besides the humans that speaks, just the same with the Bible, by the way.
So no, I know, no guesses as to why that maybe because then it seems to be comic, you couldn't be as funny if you brought the divine in or something like this. One thing I thought was interesting is that language prior to woman's arrival is largely just naming things. And there's reference to that. He said, I don't get to name things anymore.
Right. And there's also this new word that he's like, what the hell is this? And it's the word we. So there's no first person plural.
So it's never God in Adam. It was just Adam naming things. So one hypothesis is that maybe he never wrote a diary until she was taken from his rib, right? That there's no communication between two eyes.
So there's no we if there's no we, there's no reason I guess to write. And so maybe it starts here because one would never write unless one were incomplete and part of a sort of linguistic community. Yeah. And so I'm wondering who the audience of, I mean, I don't mean who tweens audiences, but who Adams audiences in the text.
And so far as you're right that, I mean, who's Adam writing this diary for? I mean, and the his accounts of things are very pitty. If that like he's mostly commenting on whether and things that you've done that annoys him. It's like for himself.
Yeah, that's what I thought of sort of for himself. And remember this is hieroglyphics. It's not a journal in right. It's called the journal.
Yeah, he calls it a journal, but I wonder if that's how Adam understands it. Yeah, we're trees, right? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Thursday, Thursday, first week. Why?
I don't know. Yeah, there's days and then you're right. He understands the weak, right? And he calls out resting on Sunday at first it pisses him off.
Yeah. He after an annoying wife rank was all week long. Like we've all got to get it. He's like, I get it.
And then here's pass and he's able to, he's able to mark that too. Greg, Greg's question though. I wish I had a good answer for that. Greg, I don't know.
Do you think that this is Twain's way of demonstrating that this, that even if you were to subtract the divine from certain aspects of, from certain portions of scripture, it's still intelligible in a way that there's still a story or a lesson to be had. Not in this short story, but yeah. I mean, Alex and I have talked before about Genesis as comedy. Actually, in other words, the possibility that the Bible itself is presenting creation in the comic light.
I think there are some pastors that are pretty funny if you sort of talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. So a few of them come up and I use the Robert Alter translation of that.
But there are a few examples of humor. One is that God commands the grass grass, but it doesn't grass grows or little things that like the universe is not simply according to God's will. There's some other ones like when Adam does eat the apple and God confronts him. God says, what happened?
And he's like, you, you did this. It sort of blames God. So there are a few passages where you found that comical. Well, it's sort of like you gave me the woman and then he's like, it's the woman's fault, but it's your fault because you gave me that woman and sort of adds, I find this one comical.
Yeah. I mean, it could be read conflict. It's like a child. That's how a child would like Adam and Eve were talking about.
Yeah. And so I guess my only point is that it's, I wonder if Twain felt it was safer to amplify the comic accounts of creation by removing God. So another, for example, would be God is God in the Eve portion of the diary. I didn't read that, but you did.
I did read that. No, she's not. Okay. So at least that's my recollection.
I'll talk about that. God is she. Yeah, that was bizarre. No, strange.
Sorry. She doesn't write about God in the case. I think she had something else to say. Ooh, feminist theology.
Yeah, I like it, Greg. I like it. So I just... I mean, God mother, it was sorry, Greg.
Just that I wonder if Twain didn't think it was safer to be comic about. Twain can amplify the comic of account of creation by removing God. The animals, that's another thing I just say. Anyone type of this in a moment.
But originally, I think I got this from some hints in the alter translation. It strikes me that all of the animals are vegetarian or herbivores. God intended all the animals to not eat other animals. And God creates tame animals and wild animals.
So to remove any sort of human violence towards animals or something like this is sort of weird. But it's sort of comical to think about, as Twain brings out, lions and tigers and bears, like eating grass. If they were all tame and they were all peaceful, what did lions eat? I don't know.
I thought that God's inclusion in the story would have been more hilarious. You're like, but Twain could have written in the hilarious. That's true. Oh, there's this voice comes down.
Talk to you. I think he gets rid of the expulsion, even God's will there. One of the things that's interesting is Eve gets the commandment, not to eat second hand. In the Bible.
In the Bible. And here. And so she hasn't heard the voice of God, which is apparently even in Twain's we tell him he's really gotten into. He's just not going to do it.
Now, one thing that's interesting, maybe this is along the beginning of an answer or it's just a way to think about your question is that the biblical account is always very truncated, which situates in a kind of grand cosmic historical narrative, right? The time unfolding of this of this individual who becomes a family of animation, right? In the course of Genesis and into Exodus. Whereas what he does here is he expands a brief couple versus really like about, well, when you get to the children's office, at least initially into a very kind of quotidian existence, right?
And he says, what was it like from the human perspective? You hear this voice, essentially not supposed to do something. Here's this new creature. You have zero experience of anything like this.
And you're trying to reckon with this experience. So you use language, I guess hieroglyphics you would use as best you can, e-magistic speech, just like visual pictorial speech to try to make sense of. And so there's a lot of crying, for example. It doesn't have a word for crying.
He says water coming from the holes on its face. That is the... Where she sees from, yeah. Yeah, this is where she sees from.
Little things like that that I think get at the sort of how novel and peculiar I must have seen and what would the human mind have done having never seen anything like this before? You know, it's weird though. The only animal that talks is the snake. And this doesn't seem to register without him.
Though he recounts that the snake advises Eve to eat the apple slash chest. Not sure that he's the snake tricks her. Because he said the result would be quote, a great and find a noble education. Lord knows where he got those concepts, but he still records it just like that in his diary.
The one would think that the only other animal that speaks would somehow intrigue Adam, but he doesn't pay to mind other than saying he's delighted that he finally has somebody to complain to to talk to against her office back. Now he does another animal that speaks a parent. I forgot about this. Oh really?
Yeah, in the second to last entry, he says, the old one is tamer than it was and can laugh and talk with the parent having learned this from being with the parent so much. That's after the expulsion. It's after the expulsion. Sure.
But there's another talking animal. Okay. Yeah. Adam seems to express that's what you just said, David.
I mean, he doesn't seem to be at all interested in conversation or learning about the world. He's sort of naming things and doing what he wants and engaging in sort of reckless sectors, no death, I guess. So he just does all this fun, dangerous stuff like going over the Niagara Falls, right? So which by the way, sounds kind of fun in a barrel.
No, he only does the barrel after she's nagging. I'm like fine. Where's he getting a barrel? Yeah.
Yeah. But so the whole thing seems to be about how miserable she's made his life. I mean, she's putting up signs everywhere. You already mentioned this.
And one of them is keep off the grass. You mentioned and my favorite of the lines. He says, she put up the sign that says keep off the grass. Next line.
My life is not as happy as it was. That's great. That's so fantastic. But you also, I mean, suddenly, like one of the things she brings in by calling it Niagara Falls and talking about taking vacations, saying the falls are just for scenery, right?
He slowly starts adopting her language. Right. He complains that she says, oh, I'm not an it. I'm a she.
And he says, I don't know about that. And next entry, he just keeps calling her she, right? And then he says, I need a change of scene. So he starts adopting her way of speaking.
It seems like he's slowly getting reconciled to women's view of things, right? Yeah. Beautiful. Let me ask you a question about death because I had struck me that there was an interesting possible contradiction.
Maybe right of reconcilion. But I'm not particularly speaking. If you go off and have a false heat in a barrel, you're going to die, right? And so it must be that you can do deadly things in Eden before the expulsion and live.
And I was struck by the fact that. So why does it scare her? That's a bit anyway, sorry. Yeah, it scares her.
And then also remember they take the fish out of the water and they get very quiet. So I was wondering, maybe the fish, he doesn't mention that they like putrefy or there's worms coming out of them. They just get quiet. Nothing dies.
Maybe in Eden, you can do all these crazy things and you can even take a fish out of the water and it doesn't die. It just kind of stops moving. It's quiet. It comes back to life.
Yeah. But I don't know. Is there death? I don't think so.
I mean, based on what you said, the Niagara Falls bit I thought. Yeah. And there's no death or fear. Right.
I'm also, I mean, or any attraction either. There's no law, sorry, long geek. Oh, I see. There's no desire to unite flesh.
He has no desire for her. Yeah. He has no erotic desires. Yeah.
He's going to fix up. Then they have kids. But you know what's interesting about the way they talk about the children. It's exactly like Rousseau postulates.
It's like an early man would have no idea where kids come from. It's like that. They like come together and have sex. They would like nine months later.
They wouldn't people would connect it. Yeah. Whatever. But it seems like this is the case as well.
That to me, I read this years and years ago. I only understood. So when the baby's first born, he's a sex, it's a fish. You're talking about Rousseau over here.
No, here. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so he tries to put it in the water.
He's very bad, right? He even gets mad at him. He doesn't like his experiment. She likes to experiment before the fall.
Once she has children, she no longer is down with experiments. Yeah. But I never understood that joke until I myself had a child. So we're talking the last one.
You had a child? Well, you mean your wife had a child? Yeah, my wife had a child. And I looked at my child and she was just like, you know, wide eyes, not looking anywhere.
And it looked just exactly like a fish. You can imagine Mark Twain just at a person's house and be like, God damn, that baby just looks like a pig. I think it looks like a fish too. If I didn't know better, I think it was a fish and well, Adam wouldn't know better.
So he must think it's a fish. And then when it's- And it's changed into a monkey, right? He thinks that he'd later thinks it's a monkey. Or a kangaroo.
A kangaroo. Because his legs are longer. Right. On the bottom, like a kangaroo is that kind of babies crouch, you know.
And then he thinks it's a bear because it's wall bear. That's what I'm saying. And he's determined to get put in before it gets fangs. So the mountains discovers no teeth.
And he's like, a few. It's only one term. Well, he's thinking now. But then he finally does realize it's a human being.
Yeah. Ten years later. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
He said, which is pretty funny because that means that basically, you know, we're not human until we're about ten. We're like, we're clearly deficient as human beings. Yeah. And when he reports it, ten years later, because you know this is extract.
So maybe, but it sounds like it's a discovery. Yeah. It was coming in that small image or shape that puzzled us. We were not used to all, you know, oral, but it seems like that realization that he writes down, you know, this realization, somehow noticing that there are boys.
There were no boys before. He was just an adult man. Yeah. Yeah.
I have another question about this. We've sort of glossed over and mentioned a few times that this all takes place in upstate New York. And does anybody have any idea why? I mean, you alluded to the idea of a joke of someone discovering holy scrolls in upstate New York.
Is that what's going on here? Oh, why? Why? Why not put it in the Middle East?
Or why not put it in? Where's he from? Where's he from? Where's he from?
That's another. He's undercutting it. Undercutting what? The veracity of the scripture.
Okay. Right. Just placing it upstate New York. He's just poking it in the hole.
He could be anywhere. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking maybe that would be the only way Mark Twain would discover the original manuscript.
Well, he could have invented a trip that he took to the Middle East. He's making it absurd. So why is he? He's a rodent.
Well, why is Twain... What's your theory, then Greg? Why is Twain... No, I don't have an answer.
I mean, he's just being cute. Yeah, but then I think I suspect that he did it on purpose. I mean, why North America would they find he's North American? Why upstate New York?
Why not somewhere else? I mean, let me try this anyway. Upstate New York would not be hospitable to human flourishing original human beings. Right?
I mean, like Buffalo's hell. It's definitely cold there in the winter. Yeah. I don't see...
The story is more likely if human beings are generating a total of human Niagara Falls too. Yeah. That's right. Not in the summer though, right?
Yeah, sure. She said that's right. So I think maybe the joke is something like, well, what is Eden? Well, it's a place that's very nice to go when it's warm out.
Yeah. So the sound would be too hot, right? But Niagara Falls is very scenic. People vacation there.
But maybe... Lake can bring everything to... Can I press this just a little bit if I were being... I wonder if Twain isn't pointing to the fact that the world is not infact hospitable to human existence.
As far as deathly winter cold and these kinds of things. I don't know. The idea that there's a place that is conducive to human wellbeing, you know, a paradise is just not tenable. I'm not sure.
It's just strange. Maybe it's just because it's funny that here it is in Niagara Falls finally. I get nothing else. Well, can you tell us a little bit about youth diary?
Does it track on the same days or what can you recall? I remember you telling me it's much longer. Yeah. It is much longer.
But if you overlay the two... Yeah. Is it the same days? Is he doing it?
There's a lot of overlap between the two. It's not as long and it's not nearly as funny. Another contrast is that she cares. What was that?
What was that? Were you making a joke that women aren't funny? I think we disproved that. I was actually incredulous.
I think you look one man's implications and other man's influence. I'll leave him that. I don't know what that means. That's a big word.
It's much longer and it's not as funny. It doesn't seem as piecemeal as Adams. It's clear she cares more about him from reading that than from reading this. This seems like Adam eventually reconciles to him.
I know that Alice wanted to talk about that. But from the gift go, Eve is interested in Adam from her point of view. The other thing it does is it really turns things back around into a whole new interpretation of the same set of facts. So in the Adam, why do you think Adam was so glad that Eve goes to talk to the snake right?
Finally, she's leaving us alone. The animal's the only animal that speaks. I think that what you learn in her diary is that the reason she speaks to the snake is the only animal that will speak to her. She's actually quite lonely.
If you remember in the Adam and Eve one, he makes fun of her looking in the lake and looking at herself. He thinks she's just admiring her own beauty. In her diary, it's clear that she's looking in the lake because she's longing for someone to talk to or to be with. She's in a reflection of her sad attempt to find somebody that she can be with.
She's deeply lonely. Adam's soul is her conceitiveness. It's much more emotive. It's much more eloquent.
It talks much more about Eve uses words more associated with feelings and thoughts. She's feeling and emotions. I thought this. I thought that.
I don't know. I think that when we read just the extracts from Adam's diary, it seems like the joke is on Eve. When you read them together, it seems like maybe it's a little more ambivalent or even handed or even maybe ending up more on Eve's side. The final word of Eve's diary, she's dead.
It shows Adam at her grave site. Adam says the following. Wherever she was, there was Eden. In both stories, Adam being reconciled to Eve.
It's quite sweet. I enjoyed reading that. Adam's perspective. The reconciliation has to do with spending the day of rest.
Prior to the expulsion, a number of Sundays we get just for the entry. The day of rest means you hang out with women every day. During the week, you're out falling off Niagara Falls. You're just sort of hanging out.
It seems like being expelled from Eden, realizing you're going to die. And working all day to provide the day of rest becomes a very sweet and spending time with your sons and your wife who's giving you these sons becomes an incredible joy. It seems like that plays a crucial role. I love that moment because sometimes my wife does it with a podcast.
She doesn't even listen to me when I talk to her. But when there's some days on the weekend where it's just like Sunday, 8 p.m. and I just sit in my head and I'm sitting there about to go, damn pulled through. No shame on you.
So I was reading from the diary of Deded Bar. Can you explain to the audience, Greg, what this pulled through phrase? Adam repeats it every Sunday. It reminded me of the song, everybody's working for the weekend.
But every Sunday his entry is pulled through. It means he made it with an answer. He's not working for the weekends. There's no work before you're expelled.