Wanda Pedersen’s Reviews > The Year of the Flood > Status Update

When next you eat a golden Peach
And lightly throw away the pit,
Consider how it shines with Life--
God dwelling in the midst of it.

God gave unto the Animals
A wisdom past our power to see;
Each knows innately how to live,
Which we must learn laboriously.

According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; .... Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.

Toby couldn't remember being hugged by a child. For the children it must have been a formality, like hugging a distant aunt, but for her it was something she couldn't define: fuzzy, softly intimate. Like being nuzzled by rabbits. But rabbits from Mars.