Adam Naming the Animals by Faith Shearin After he could no longer speak with them, after the warm garden had a draft, and Adam found himself naked and mortal, after his wife was made from his own cage of love, and after she introduced him to the snake that offered its famous advice, after all these things, God asked Adam to name the animals. Eve would bring forth children in great pain but Adam must name the beasts, one by one, remembering how he had known them, how they once had voices as clear as the difference between good and evil. He felt the loss of their friendship: he used to rely on the birds to watch the future and the dogs to sniff the past. Now he had names for them but they had no name for him, their thoughts as hidden as the wishes of trees. God spoke loudly and set things on fire but the animals were now as silent as snow, traveling on their many legs, wrapped in fur or feathers. Adam was lonely and less able to see the world, though the fruit he'd eaten promised clarity. Naming the animals was hard because it was like naming all the parts of himself he no longer knew, all the parts he could not understand. “Adam Naming the Animals” by Faith Shearin from Moving the Piano. Stephen F. Austin University Press © 2011. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) It's the birthday of technology writer David Pogue, (books by this author) born in Shaker Heights, Ohio (1963), one of the best-selling "how-to-guide" authors ever. He's written several books in the For Dummies series, including the first guide to Mac computers, and guides to opera and classical music and magic. His novel Hard Drive was a New York Times "notable book of the year." It's the birthday of writer Vita Sackville-West, (books by this author) born in Knole, England (1892), born with a silver spoon in her mouth: she grew up in a mansion with 365 rooms and 52 staircases. But her childhood wasn't exactly idyllic nor happy, since she and her mother didn't get along well. She started writing early; before her 19th birthday she'd written eight novels. And by the time she married at age 22 the dashing diplomat Harold Nicolson, she'd had several love affairs with women. As it turns out, her husband was gay. It was a wonderfully companionable and happy marriage, and when the two were apart from each other, they wrote each other daily letters. One of Vita Sackville-West's most famous romances was with writer Virginia Woolf. In January 1927, she wrote to Woolf a letter that said: "I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn't even feel it. And yet I believe you'll be sensible of a little gap. But you'd clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. ... oh my dear, I can't be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don't love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don't really resent it." Later that year, in October, Woolf had come up with the idea for a new novel, inspired by Vita, who often wore man's clothes. Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography, about a transgender writer who lives for hundreds of years, came out in 1928. Vita's son Nigel called Woolf's book "the longest and most charming love-letter in literature." It was made into a movie in 1992. Vita Sackville-West kept up one of the most famous gardens in England, and she went on to write a great many books, including the novels Seducers in Ecuador (1924), The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), and Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour (1932). Vita Sackville-West said: "It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?" Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® |