Florida! - Part the First

April 6-13, 2014

Notes on Florida – Part the First

I had hoped to write about Florida last week, when I was there; but it proved impossible. Rather, I did write, but given the state of the internet on the peninsula – at least at the kinds of place Castle wanted to stay: motels the color of sherbet with flamingos hand-painted on the shower curtains − I couldn’t post anything I wrote.

          I begin here with a general observation. Pray that I become more specific as this week of retrospection goes on.

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There is much in Florida that is ugly, even if I don’t see it through Castle’s nephew’s narrow young eyes − “ugly” is his word − but through my own older, sadder, blurrier ones. There is something slapdash about the buildings, the lawns, the trees, the soil, the oddly made critters. It’s as if the peninsula itself was an afterthought, squeezed out of Alabama, Georgia, and a sliver of Mississippi, and left there alone between the Atlantic and the Gulf for a very long time. People came late, and they came running from something – the cold, perhaps, or the law, or everyday life. They didn’t intend to stay; so they threw up shacks made of what they found lying around. In any case, they didn’t need more than a roof to sleep under when it rained and a fire-pit to cook fish and hares, whatever they could net or snare or whatever jumped or walked right into their hands and pots.

          There was no need of prayer, no need of providence; everything, fish, fruit and vegetables, was there, to hand. There was no need of prayer, no need of providence, no need of God; so there was no need of churches, or of zoning or school boards. There was only need of a woman or a man and only as long as the need lasted, which was often not very long at all, given the heat and one already had a full belly.

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This was Adam and Eve’s mistake − apart from their sin, which was quite another matter. (Sin and mistake are not synonyms.)  They needed nothing, yet they invented Law, the prohibition of eating from the one tree; and with Law they invented God, and zoning and school boards soon followed. And following zoning and school boards came not only the division of property but sex education and free lunches, because the Law corrupted innocence, and Agriculture made food scarce.

*** 

The sin of Adam and Eve was, incidentally, a form of Gnosticism, believing they could know what they could not.

 f

(I’m pretty confident about this one; but I could still be wrong.)