ROME: 21st February 2006 - There have been some
valiant
responses to "Of man's first disobedience and the fruit...".
(#1456).
It might be worth sharing some of them.
"Mel Gibson wrote it himself":
Intelligent response; 'The
Passion...' does share some of the key ideas in that line, but had
Gibson written it, it would have been in Aramaic or Latin.
"Shakespearean Sonnet": Which one?
Tricked by the blank verse,
perhaps? Besides, wouldn't it be more like "To eat, or not to
eat,
that is the question"?
"T.S. Eliot": No, no, way off, that's
not what I meant, not what I
meant at all!
"Dan Brown": What, of Da Vinci Code
fame? No, he'd be giving us the telephone number of the Garden of
Eden: E81, I812,
"John Steinbeck": The phrase was "loss of
Eden" not "East of Eden"
and the plot is Adam and Eve not Cain and Abel. But warm -
Genesis is
certainly a clue.
We are getting closer obviously; people were homing
in on the 'good
and evil' bit without much difficulty. "Genesis" was not an
acceptable answer though; only the idea for the lines came
from Genesis. Besides we would need the author, because
Genesis is also
a Rock Band, and these are not rock lyrics!. Tolkien was another bright
suggestion, but no sign
of Hobbits in the quoted line. Heart skipped a beat when someone
wrote
in with "It's from Paradise Lost. 4 seconds. Thanks
Google". Ooooh, so close, but not so fast. He (from Vietnam,
Japan?) forgot
to mention who the author was, and there's more than one Paradise Lost
- the Opera, another Rock Band, a well-known British poet!! Just
goes
to show, you shouldn't rely on Google for everything.
Of course, someone did write in with the correct,
most complete
answer saying, to be precise, "These lines seem to have been quoted
from John Milton's Paradise Lost". The winner added, "No tears
shed
for the trip to Mago island that can never be. We shall keep our
fingers crossed for Paradise Regained". This man certainly knows
his
literature. Milton did write the sequel to Paradise Lost, though
not,
as one schoolboy wag put it: "after his wife died"! The winner,
by the
way, is a past pupil, living in Kolkata and, I believe, a journalist.
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