Ever since Sunday school, I’d been intrigued by the notion of Eden. It irritated my Methodist teachers that Eden appealed to me far more than heaven. Heaven you might get to after your death, if you were good—but there was no hope, I was told, of finding Eden. Heaven seemed boring, though. There is no mention of plants or animals there, whereas Eden was full of them. In Eden, the animals spoke (at least the snake did), and we understood what they said. In heaven you had to live in a building (“In my Father’s house there are many mansions,” Jesus said), and I wanted to live in a hollow tree. In
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