The New Adam and Eve (From "Mosses from an Old Manse")Hawthorne, Nathaniel
General
The New Adam and Eve (From "Mosses from an Old Manse")
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories
Assuredly there are sights enough to throw the new inheritors of earth
into a state of hopeless perplexity. The long lines of edifices, their
windows glittering in the yellow sunrise, and the narrow street
between, with its barren pavement tracked and battered by wheels that
have now rattled into an irrevocable past! The signs, with their
unintelligible hieroglyphics! The squareness and ugliness, and regular
or irregular deformity of everything that meets the eye! The marks of
wear and tear, and unrenewed decay, which distinguish the works of man
from the growth of nature! What is there in all this, capable of the
slightest significance to minds that know nothing of the artificial
system which is implied in every lamp-post and each brick of the
houses? Moreover, the utter loneliness and silence, in a scene that
originally grew out of noise and bustle, must needs impress a feeling
of desolation even upon Adam and Eve, unsuspicious as they are of the
recent extinction of human existence. In a forest, solitude would be
life; in a city, it is death.
The new Eve looks round with a sensation of doubt and distrust, such as
a city dame, the daughter of numberless generations of citizens, might
experience if suddenly transported to the garden of Eden. At length her
downcast eye discovers a small tuft of grass, just beginning to sprout
among the stones of the pavement; she eagerly grasps it, and is
sensible that this little herb awakens some response within her heart.
Nature finds nothing else to offer her. Adam, after staring up and down
the street without detecting a single object that his comprehension can
lay hold of, finally turns his forehead to the sky. There, indeed, is
something which the soul within him recognizes.
“Look up yonder, mine own Eve,” he cries; “surely we ought to dwell
among those gold-tinged clouds or in the blue depths beyond them. I
know not how nor when, but evidently we have strayed away from our
home; for I see nothing hereabouts that seems to belong to us.”
“Can we not ascend thither?” inquires Eve.
“Why not?” answers Adam, hopefully. “But no; something drags us down in
spite of our best efforts. Perchance we may find a path hereafter.”
In the energy of new life it appears no such impracticable feat to
climb into the sky. But they have already received a woful lesson,
which may finally go far towards reducing them to the level of the
departed race, when they acknowledge the necessity of keeping the
beaten track of earth. They now set forth on a ramble through the city,
in the hope of making their escape from this uncongenial sphere.
Already in the fresh elasticity of their spirits they have found the
idea of weariness. We will watch them as they enter some of the shops
and public or private edifices; for every door, whether of alderman or
beggar, church or hall of state, has been flung wide open by the same
agency that swept away the inmates.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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