Eternal Adam
Eternal Adam is a short story by the French author Michel Verne . It is mostly assigned to his father Jules Verne , which was also the intention of Michel Verne. It was published under the French title L'Éternel Adam in the magazine La Revue de Paris on October 1, 1910 and in the anthology of short stories Yesterday and Tomorrow (French. Hier et demain ) together with short stories by Jules and Michel Verne in November and December Published in France in 1910 .
action
In the fictional land of Hars-Iten-Schu , which is surrounded by four seas, lives a people who have been shaped by bloody wars in the course of their history. The roots of the country are not known to its residents. The scholar Dr. Zartog Sofr-Aï-Sr, who is the third male representative of the hundredth generation of the Sofr sex, tries to investigate the question of the origin scientifically. It can trace the history of life over a period of twenty thousand years. According to his knowledge, only the last eight thousand years have been shaped by civilization. During this time, knowledge accumulated and technology continued to develop. Historians are satisfied with the history of this ancestral line of peoples and especially also with researching the disputes between the groups of peoples. However, Sofr wants more. He is interested in the real origin of civilization and life. He is working on a theory about the descent of animals from a life form originating from the sea.
Sofr carries out excavations under several layers of sediment that document the period of at least twenty thousand years. A strange artifact is found, an aluminum box containing ancient documents. These are scrolls from a time which, according to previous knowledge, was without intelligence and without a civilizational history. Sofr investigates the riddle and can decipher the writing after several years. It is the diary of a French man living in Central America from the year 2xxx. Sofr doesn't know what a French is. The document portrays a catastrophe of enormous proportions. The earth was inundated by a gigantic deluge . With just a few people, the author was able to flee into the mountains by car from the flood. They were overtaken by the tidal wave but rescued from their distress by a ship . Without a destination, they cruise the oceans . The continents have perished and world civilization has been extinguished. The food is running out. You will find a small, almost uninhabitable, barren and desolate island . They decide to go ashore because there is drinking water there. The struggle for survival demands that all forces and intellectual abilities of the colonists degenerate in the coming years. After years the population is slowly increasing. Without civilization, the inhabitants eke out their lives on the level of savages. With the last of his strength, the chronicler closes his aluminum box and buries it.
After reading this, Sofr wonders whether life as such is a cycle. He finds something about the interpretation of the word Hedom that is nothing more than the twisting of Edem. Edem is again the warping of Adam and Adam is again the warping of another expression that was even older. Hedom, Edem and Adam are nothing more than the eternal symbol of the first man. Sofr has thus cleared the arrival of the first human on his world. He is pessimistic and the story ends with his realization that obviously everything has to be started all over again.
Bibliography (selection)
- Jules Verne: The Eternal Adam . Zurich: Diogenes Verlag, 1977, ISBN 3-257-20411-6
literature
- Heinrich Pleticha (ed.): Jules Verne manual . Deutscher Bücherbund / Bertelsmann, Stuttgart and Munich 1992.
- Volker Dehs and Ralf Junkerjürgen: Jules Verne . Voices and interpretations of his work. Fantastic Library Wetzlar, Wetzlar 2005.
- Volker Dehs : Jules Verne . Jules Verne. A critical biography. Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf 2005. ISBN 3-538-07208-6
