Needing to know got us kicked out of the Garden of Eden.
That’s where it began—with a question too bright to look at. The air was still then, the fruit hanging quietly, gold and full. We lived inside a hush. Nothing moved unless the wind willed it. But something stirred, a restlessness, a shimmer behind the ribs. What if? The words rose like breath on glass.
We leaned toward that thought, the way a flower leans toward light. It was not rebellion, not yet. Only wonder. But wonder sharpens; it wants to touch what it sees. So we reached out—and the garden folded behind us, closing like a book.
Now it’s only a story, half-remembered. We walk its edges, tracing what we’ve lost. Each of us—Eve, Adam, serpent, child—carries a shard of that first wanting. It glints when the sun catches it. It cuts when we hold it too long.
I hear them still—voices beneath the leaves. We were not meant to know, but we were meant to wonder. How cruel, how tender, that those two are twins. I walk through fields where every blade of grass asks another question: why green? why grow? why die? And I answer none of them, only listen.
There are mornings when the sky seems to forgive us. Mist softens the trees, and for a moment the horizon blurs, as if the gate might open again. But then the sun rises, relentless, illuminating every exile’s face. We are bright with our own excess.
Needing to know—we call it curiosity, we call it science, we call it love. It is the same hunger, dressed in different tongues. We devour the stars now, we peel back atoms, we swallow data. Still, the aftertaste is the same as the fruit’s: sweet, then salt.
The garden was never lost at all. It is inside a question itself—the space between wanting and knowing. And if we could bear to dwell there, trembling, unfulfilled, perhaps we would see that Eden was never a place, but a moment before the word why was born.
So be careful of curiosity, even when it glitters with promise, calls to our longing. For each bite of the fruit is a whisper that may grow into a roar. The more we indulge without conscience, the emptier we become, until desire devours us from within. For at first, we use knowledge and then knowledge uses us. Such is the blueprint of an addiction.
And when in childhood, we, without our higher minds, could pick the fruit at will, without the consequence of overflowing the basket, now, as adults we must temper our collection or else be weighed down. For the basket is life itself. Only by turning away—by letting the craving lie dormant, by embracing silence – not knowing —might we find a fragile reprieve, the slender thread of calm that holds the world together.