Another Insane Devotion by Peter Trachtenberg Read Free Book Online Page B

dead. Unlike dogs, cats have no taste for carrion.
    Â 
    I have stated my problem with the term “forbidden fruit”—I mean its association with the apple of the Tree of Knowledge, which probably wasn’t an apple at all. Adam and Eve may have eaten that fruit in spite of God’s injunction, but they didn’t eat because of it. The true forbidden fruit may be the pears Augustine writes about in the Confessions. He was sixteen. They grew on a tree close to his family’s vineyard in Thagaste, and neither their color nor their flavor was special:
    But late one night, having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was—a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden.
    Augustine, by the way, believed that before the Fall, sex was a purely voluntary act and not the tortured impulse it has been
ever since. Adam willed his erections the way somebody wills a handshake. When he did, however, he was probably being more than just friendly.

The Animals in the Garden of Eden
    This is a Gnostic legend from the early Christian era. Because God created Adam and Eve as vegetarians (“Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food”), they really had no need of the animals over which they had been given dominion, not even the beasts of burden, for they could get all the food they wanted without plowing, and they had no possessions that had to be carried. Nor did the animals need people, and so in those first days they kept mostly to themselves. The only exceptions were the dog and the cat. The dog already liked humans—Adam, especially, who threw him sticks—and the cat was curious about them. They were so outlandish. Of all the creatures in the Garden, they alone had no fur and walked upright on their hind legs, and whenever they saw the cat, they made a sound that in time he understood was meant to make him come to them. Sometimes he did.
    And so on the day Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the dog and the cat were nearby. When Adam took a bite of the fruit Eve had given him, the dog came closer, wagging his tail and grinning as if to ask, “Maybe something for me?” And Adam tore off some of the fruit and gave it to him. It was the first time a human had fed an animal by hand or, indeed, fed one at all. Now the cat came up to them. He
did it only out of curiosity, but the woman thought he was hungry, so she took a piece of the fruit, a small piece because it was so sweet and so nice and already she was inflamed by a feeling no one had ever felt before—greed—and held it out in her hand as the man had done with the dog. The cat approached and sniffed the fruit, his tail flicking, but he wouldn’t eat it. No one thought to lay the fruit on the ground—where the cat still might not have eaten it—and in the next moment the woman gave in to her greed and ate the fruit herself, sucking the pulp from her fingers and sighing because she wished there were more. The cat watched her.
    Then God came, and they knew what they had done. He sentenced the people to unceasing toil and the pangs of childbirth and, saving the worst for last, death. Then he looked at the dog and the cat. What was he going to do with them? The dog, sensing trouble, hung his head and began to whimper. The cat looked up at God. I don’t know if it was the dog’s crying or the cat’s unblinking gaze that softened him. “Well, I only warned those two,” God said to himself. “Those people .” It was the first time that anyone had ever spoken in a voice filled with disgust. He looked at the animals. “How