A Walled Garden

“The Garden of Eden 

and 

The Heavenly Jerusalem 

are the same place, depending on whether you are looking 

backward or forward.”

"One of the variants of the hero — and I would consider a variant of the hero like a fragment of the picture of God — is the heroic warrior who slays the enemy. Of course, that's not precisely a politically correct representation of a hero in modern times, and no wonder, but it's still something that you go watch in movies all the time and admire. It’s one of the most — how many plots are there? Romance and adventure, that’s about it. Most of the adventure genre is, well, there’s some enemy that’s lurking in some form — it could be human, it could be alien — and someone rises up to go and confront it and maintain order. There's no getting away from that story. 

If you don't have that in your own life, you play a video game where that's happening, or you watch a movie where that's happening, or you read a book where that’s happening. It captures you, even if you're atheistic and your only religion is Star Wars. It still captures your imagination. You act like someone who’s possessed by religious fervor when you line up for three days to be the first one into the theatre — and all the while claiming that you’re atheistic to the core.

It’s hard to get a grip on what "without form and void" exactly means. I can give you another kind of example of how you would experience the formless chaos of potential in your own lives, and even how the order that you currently inhabit can dissolve into that. In Dante's Inferno, he outlined the levels of hell. Dante was trying to get to the bottom of what constituted evil in this representation. It's a work of psychology, and he’s thinking, well, there are various ways to behave reprehensibly, but there's a hierarchy of reprehensible behaviour, and there's something absolutely the worst at the bottom. Dante believed that it was betrayal. I think that’s right, because one of the things that enables long-term, peaceful cooperation between people is trust. I would also say that trust is the fundamental natural resource.

There's been some very good books written on the economic utility of trust. Societies where the default economic presupposition between trading partners is trust tend to be rich, even if they don't have any natural resources. You can see that, for example, with what happened with eBay, which I think was kind of a miracle. What should have happened with eBay was that you sent me junk and I sent you a cheque that bounced, and that was the end of eBay. But that isn't what happened. The default transaction on eBay was so honest that the brokers—you could hire brokers, to begin with. I can't remember what they were called, exactly, but you could pay someone a fee so that they would guarantee the transaction. You wouldn’t send me junk and I’d actually send you a payment, and we’d pay 10 percent for someone to guarantee that. The default trade was so honest that those things vanished right away. That meant that all this frozen capital, roughly speaking, which were all the junk that people had lying around that someone else might want, instantly became money. The only reason that worked is that people trusted one another. Trust is an unbelievably powerful economic force, maybe the most powerful economic force.

Anyways, part of the reason for having a relationship predicated on trust is that trust is what enables us to look at each other without running away screaming. What I mean by that is that, if I trust you, then I don’t have to take into account how complicated you are, because you’re horribly complicated. A chimpanzee full of snakes: that’s what a human being is. As long as you’ll do what you say you’ll do, then I can take you at your word, and your word simplifies you. You can take my word, and my word simplifies you, and then we can act like we understand each other, even though we don’t.

But then, if that trust is betrayed, then all the snakes come forth very, very rapidly. All of you, I suspect, have been betrayed in one way or another. If you're in a relationship with someone and you trust them, then you make certain assumptions about the past, and you make certain assumptions about the present, and you make certain assumptions about the future, and everything’s stable. You’re standing on solid ground and the chaos—it's like you're standing on thin ice. The chaos is hidden; the shark beneath the waves isn't there. You’re safe; you’re in the lifeboat. But the instant the person betrays you…If you're in a intimate relationship and the person has an affair, and you find out about it, one moment you're in one place where everything is secure, because you predicated your perception of the world on the axiom of trust, and the next second—really, the next second—you’re in a completely different place. Not only is that place different right now, but the place you were years ago is different, and the place you're gonna be in the future years hence is different.

All of that certainty, that strange certainty that you inhabit, can collapse into incredible complexity. If someone betrays you, you think, well, ok, who were you? Because you aren't who I thought you were, and I thought I knew you. But I didn't know you at all, and I never knew you. All the things we did together, those weren’t the things that I thought were happening. Something else was happening, and you are someone else, and that means I'm someone else, because I thought I knew what was going on, and clearly I don’t. I’m some sort of blind sucker, or the victim of a psychopath, or someone who’s so naive that they can barely live. I don't understand anything about human beings, and I don't understand anything about myself, and I have no idea where I am now. I thought I was at home, but I’m not. I’m in a house, and it's full of strangers. I don't know what I’m going to do tomorrow, or next week, or next year. All of that certainty, that habitable certainty, collapses right back into the potential from which it emerged. That's a terrifying thing. That's a journey to the underworld, from a mythological perspective.

That is really something worth knowing, because journeys to the underworld are extraordinarily common in mythological stories—like the hobbit going out to find Smaug, the dragon, and get the gold, is the journey into the underworld. Journeys to the underworld happen all the time. Modern people don't understand what the underworld is, except that we’ve all been there and we go there all the time. We go there every time the solidity and stability of the world, that we’ve erected at least partly through our speech, is shattered because some sort of snake appears. That's another way of thinking about it. It’s a really good way of thinking about it, because no matter how carefully constructed a little habitable area that surrounds you, there's always something you didn't take into account. 

There’s always something that can pop up its head and do you in, and make you aware of your mortality and age you, or even kill you.

That's the permanent situation of life, which is part of the reason why I think the story of Adam and Eve is archetypal: it's because we do inhabit walled gardens. A walled garden is half structure and society, and half nature. That’s what the walled garden is. A walled garden is a place of paradise, warmth, love, and sustenance, but it's also the place where something can pop up at any moment and knock you out of it. I think part of the reason that story exists at the beginning of this collection of books is because it explains the eternal situation of human beings. We’re always in that situation. 

We’re in a walled garden—or we bloody well hope we are—but there's always a snake. It’s even worse because, if there is a snake, we’re exactly the sort of creatures that are going to do nothing but go and interact with that snake the second that we can manage it. It’s definitely the case that, if you want a human being to muck around with something, the best thing to do is to tell them not to ever do it, not to have anything to do with it. This is, of course, something you know if you have teenagers, or even children, or if you know anything about yourself or your partner."