# Exiled from Paradise The moment we were cast out, I understood that paradise was not a place but a condition of unknowing. We had lived in a garden where every blade of grass spoke its own name, where the air itself was a kind of speech, and we—we were part of that speech, not observers of it. We did not ask questions because there was nothing separate from us to ask about. Then came the knowledge. Not the fruit, but what the fruit carried: the terrible, glittering weight of distinction. Suddenly there was *I* and *not-I*. There was nakedness and shame. There was time—before and after, the future opening like a wound. The angel did not push us gently. I remember the heat of the sword, the way it made the air shimmer between us and what we had been. Behind us, the gate sealed with a sound like forgetting. I did not weep then. I was too busy discovering that I had eyes, that they could water, that this too was a kind of knowing. In the years that followed, we built shelter. We grew crops. We learned to make things. And slowly, almost without noticing, we began to forget that paradise had been the absence of choice. We began to mistake our labor for purpose, our suffering for meaning. We told ourselves stories about why we had been cast out—that it was punishment, that we deserved it, that there was some terrible justice in it. But I think now, near the end of my life, that the exile was an education. In paradise, I could not have loved you. I would not have had to choose you, day after day, knowing all the while that I could have turned away. I would not have known the weight of my own will, or the grace that comes from using it not for myself alone. Perhaps the angel knew this. Perhaps there is no other way to become human except through loss.

1. Women are forever claiming that men don't understand them deeply enough, don't love them quite enough. And yet women themselves remain nearly always indifferent when it comes to understanding men.

2. A man is best understood in two moments: in darkness and in bed.

3. The lover and the husband are two entirely different beings. This is why a woman cannot recognize her "husband" from the very first moment after marrying her lover. The man before marriage and the man after it are, most often, two completely different people.

4. Boys generally don't care for girls who affect masculine build or masculine behavior. Similarly, girls generally don't care for boys who affect feminine build or feminine behavior. Often enough, such people discover their passions lie elsewhere.

5. It's true that a man can be held by beauty. But it's impossible for a woman to hold a man by beauty alone, for a lifetime. No matter how beautiful a woman is, if she insists on wielding authority over her companion at every turn, it won't take long before he grows weary of that beauty.

6. Even now, standing in this age, many men still fear a woman's intellect. I want to tell them: brother, the brain—God gave it according to the person, not according to gender. The brain has no gender at all!

7. There is a certain difference in the outward appearance between a businessman and a salaried man. An experienced eye can tell at once what a man's profession is. I'll add something tangential here: business is an art, and a job is a duty.

8. An unemployed man who gives his lover all the boundless leisure of his time—that lover too ends up unemployed. The first and last consolation of unemployment is love. People prone to excessive emotion about love rarely succeed much in life.

9. A man of character never abandons his core purpose, his philosophy, his integrity under pressure from someone dear to him—if need be, he walks away from that very person. Women want to reshape the man they love, and as a result, most often, they end up losing him.

10. When a man becomes a father, he begins to transform almost of his own accord—his understanding and beliefs shift ceaselessly. The voice of a girl's father and the voice of a boy's father are two different things.

11. That man is most miserable whose life's important woman—whether mother, sister, lover, wife, or daughter—doesn't value his passion, doesn't even regard it as work worth doing. Such men feel less urgency in hurrying home from the world outside.

12. An honest man in life takes more blows than many a fanciful woman could even conjure in her imagination.

13. Among the many absurd sayings about men, the chief one is this: a man never cries. A man is made to weep constantly at two times: when there is no woman in his life, and when there is.

14. Take the uncle in your neighborhood who gossips the most and compare him to the woman in that same neighborhood who gossips the least—that uncle will never come first. On this you can be fairly certain. Don't believe me? Alright then, try it!

15. We all know the jealous face of women, and we laugh about it readily enough. But what we don’t know is that men are truly far more jealous than women. Women fling their jealousy into the open—it flashes across their faces, betrays itself in some small gesture—and you see it plainly. Men, on the other hand, hide jealousy with cunning. Vast, seething jealousies coil in a man’s heart, and only when he commits some terrible or destructive act does it become apparent. And by then, it is already too late to have seen it coming.

16. Three things happen in the life of a great man. a) He never marries at all. b) If he doesn’t marry, he cannot make his beloved—or beloveds—happy; if he does marry, he cannot make his wife—or wives—happy. If you wish to know happiness in life, never fall in love with a great man, and never marry one. c) It is a woman who makes him great—either by staying in his life, or by leaving it. Until he meets that woman, the man does not even know himself; becoming great is another matter altogether.