Dreaming Adam and Eve

The summer after the sixth grade Carol came over everyday. We’d climb the tree to the roof of the garage, sit there in the shade and dream out loud.
Carol said, "Wouldn’t it be great if we woke up one morning and everyone else were dead. We could do anything we wanted: drive the car, take all our cloths off ..."
Morning after morning we woke up and everyone else was alive. We couldn’t drive the car: though soon enough we went down into the garage and took all our cloths off.

Everyone dreams of being Adam and Eve, don’t they? Don’t you too dream of surviving something catastrophic for everything else, you alone, you and your companion survivor, your necessary mate, siring the future?
How flattering that Carol apparently wished me for her Adam. I’d take her as an Eve, I’d take almost any girl sitting on the roof with me.

As we get older the fantasy complexifies. Sitting in my office, c. 1968, my office mate, Bruce Spiegelberg, an Eighteenth Century scholar, damn interesting thesis on Robinson Cruse (with a male Eve) recreating Eighteenth Century England on the tabula rasa of his desert island, dreamed aloud the common dream of the leftist liberal, that he’d awake one morning: all the officials, the president, the governor ... no doubt the department chairman, would be hanging from the lampposts ... and here’s where Bruce seemed to think his version of Adam surviving the battle field of revolution was unique: he’d just smile. See? Bruce imagined himself surviving, being the inheritor, the new administration.
In some of my dreams as a kid, I was the one dead: Jesus, not Peter, Paul, and Mary. In 1968 I could imagine Bruce walking down the street, smiling, as everyone else is hanged, only I’m likely to be one of the ones on the lamppost. Sure some bad guys get executed in society’s occasional paroxysms, but the best guys get executed all the time, including during the paroxysm. The good die young, the best minds destroyed by madness ...
But those are dreams, common dreams, dreams in common. There were only four-some billion of us then; now there’s six-something. And what am I doing at age sixty-seven? still sitting? still babbling away?

I don’t know if it’s core-human, but it’s certainly core-contemporary to believe that the future will improve: and that we’ll get the credit! I certainly believed that much of my life, that we’d learn something from our experience, and tried my damndest to make it true, still do try; but I no longer believe it.
If I now fantasize of things getting worse and worse, that too is not uncommon, it seems to be the new wave of the core-contemporary. What’s still core-core-contemporary about it is the addiction to ideas of "better" or "worse."

Bateson admits that beauty seems always to be destroyed, yet there’s always beauty still. How does that happen? Negentropy? Happen it does. And it’s not our doing.
Even seeing the pattern, we don’t understand it.