It becomes my good fortune to team up with the inimitable Tina Cole in presenting Mark Twain’s Extracts from the Diaries of Adam and Eve. The performance is scheduled for April in Lincoln, California, so we might be calling upon you, our gentle reader, to help move Adam along, as he is a bit of a slacker.

MONDAY

“The new creature says its name is Eve. I said it was superfluous. The word evidently raised me in its respect; and indeed it is a large, good word, and will bear repetition. It says it is not an It, it is a She. Though it is all one to me, if she would not talk. In that case I think I could enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature – lithe, slender, trim, rounded, graceful; and once, when she was standing marble-white and sundrenched on a boulder with her young head tilted back, and her hand shading her eyes, I recognized that she was…beautiful.”

Eve, however, is a little more loquacious.

AFTER THE FALL

“The Garden is lost, but I have found HIM, and am content. He loves me as well as he can; I love him with all the strength of my passionate nature, and this, I think, is proper to my youth and sex. If I ask myself why I love him, I find I do not know, and do not really much care to know; so I suppose that this kind of love is not a product of reasoning and statistics, like one’s love for other reptiles and animals. I love certain birds because of their song; but I do not love Adam on account of his singin — no, it is not that; the more he sings the more I do not get reconciled to it. Yet I ask him to sing, because I wish to learn to like everything he is interested in. I am sure I can learn, because at first I could not stand it, but now I can. It sours the milk, but it doesn’t matter; I can get used to that kind of milk.

Then why is it that I love him? MERELY BECAUSE HE IS MASCULINE, I think.

Yes, I think I love him merely because he is MINE and is MASCULINE. There is no other reason, I suppose. And so I think it is as I first said: that this kind of love is not a product of reasonings and statistics. It just COMES — none knows whence — and cannot explain itself. And doesn’t need to.” 

Well, April is a long way off, and it can only help that Miss Cole and I were sweethearts in high school, away back when we knew little more than Adam and Eve, and yet are now endowed with a gift of (drumroll please)…patience.

Want to hear McAvoy Layne tell it? Go here for an audio version of this column. For more than 35 years, in over 4,000 performances, columnist and Chautauquan McAvoy has been dedicated to preserving the wit and wisdom of “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope,” Mark Twain. As Layne puts it: “It’s like being a Monday through Friday preacher, whose sermon, though not reverently pious, is fervently American.”