Raised as we are on the mythology of the Old Testament, we might say that an idyll is an image that has remained with us like a memory of Paradise: life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom.
I don’t know why reading this sentence made me think of something my husband and I had always secretly thought, but didn’t talk to each other about for a number of years. But it did. The idea we both had was that Earth has never felt like home. And that we both feel a longing for our real home. We aren’t religious in the conventional, organised, church-going way. But we are spiritual. We’ve considered that perhaps Earth is a prison. And that the length of our time here is determined by the seriousness of the crime we committed in our real world. That, we decided, would explain why “only the good die young.”
