We have to teach our children the knowledge of good and evil (or “values”, as it’s called nowadays), parents
say. So they must have learned that from their parents, and they from theirs and so on… So where did Adam and Eve get this knowledge?
I don’t know, it must have been growing on a tree or something…
This must have been the starting point
of the story of the Fall in the bible. There is only one way to teach your children the knowledge of good and evil: by making them
feel guilty when they did something bad. They never do anything bad.
Morality is part of human nature, but children have a development program, which includes the development of morality; you cannot expect the same social behavior from a child as from an adult. Interpreting children’s behavior as bad is always misinterpretation. Original sin is making a child confess to a crime it hasn’t committed.
Oscar Wilde tells the story again in “The Picture of Dorian Grey” and again the story is told, for a large part, with
the voice of the devil. It’s the analysis of evil, but the Fall itself is only referred to, as it happened when Dorian was a child.
You can see “If I Did It” as complementary to that, as it’s mainly about the Fall itself.
If I Did It,
by O.J. Simpson: a review.
There should be two categories of literary reviews; the ones you read to find out
whether you want to read the book and the ones that give you someone's interpretation of it; these you might only want to read after
you have read the book yourself. I will divide my review into two parts. Part I falls in the first category. Part II is my interpretation.
