Eden as a storyteller’s paradise

John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities Stephen Greenblatt opens his new book, “The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve,” by recalling a pivotal moment from his Roxbury childhood. Attending synagogue on the Sabbath, he is told by his parents to keep his eyes closed for final prayers to allow God to pass overhead, for anyone who sees God face-to-face will die. But the young Greenblatt tests the warning, opening his eyes to find no otherworldly spirit. It was only a story, he realizes — and now he’s hooked for life.

“We surround ourselves with them; we make them up in our sleep; we tell them to our children; we pay to have them told to us. Some of us create them professionally. And a few of us — myself included — spend our entire adult life trying to understand their beauty, power, and influence,” he writes.

Greenblatt, a Shakespearean and literary historian who won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” follows the centuries-long saga of Adam and Eve across academic disciplines ranging from the artistic to the theological, enriching “Rise and Fall” via cameos by Harvard colleagues David Damrosch, David Pilbeam, Janet Browne, and Edward O. Wilson. In a Gazette Q&A, he talked about the course that inspired the book, the shadow of Milton, and the animals that guided him to a moment of profound perspective.

GAZETTE: How long have you wanted to tell this story?

GREENBLATT: My first email about it goes back to 2013, but I was thinking about it well before that. The book was about five years in the making, but I had already taught a set of courses on the subject at Harvard with Joseph Koerner[the Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture], so I was interested already. Teaching and writing often go hand in hand. We originally taught it as a graduate course, later as an ethical reasoning general education course. The book originated in some sense in the course.

The story of Adam and Eve touches almost everything. It’s literature and art, painting and sculpture, theology and philosophy and biology. It made research both fun and difficult. I’ve shuttled back and forth in my life, between thinking about things over which I have some nominal control (Shakespeare) and things over which I have no claim to possession (this story is a perfect example). I love the challenge of getting some grip on what I know that I will never fully master. One could spend five or 50 years and not get close to exhausting this particular subject. ...