The best work I have had in my life was picking apples. There were plenty of them, all over, all kinds. I even started understanding something about Paradise. I mean the one from the Bible with the famous tree in the center; I mean the knowledge tree of good and evil. 

Actually I had to take apples from the grass but only the good ones, as Papa Klaus had commanded.  In everyday life we never do it, at least I don’t. We pick them all, everything. Life is mixed. But here in the garden I had the rights, the power and the order to separate between good and bad. How beautiful those apples were! But the beauty was not enough at all. I could not take the rotten ones, no way! Sometimes they were half rotten, sometimes it was just a beginning, just a spot, but all I could say to the apple was “sorry”, I can’t take you with me. You will finish here, no way to get into my basket.

So my knowledge grew every day together with the masses of apples I dealt with until there were seventy three kilos of apples. Of course, knowledge we don’t measure in kilos but it was a lot too. The next step was taking the good apples to the company specializing in making apple juice. There was a mountain of apples, tonnes, not just from Klaus but maybe from all the gardens surrounding Osnabruck. It looked a bit too cruel to me. I did not imagine such a future for the poor apples when I kept it to examine whether good or bad in my hand. Somehow I even thought the rotten ones were luckier to stay there in the grass. I don’t want to give you the impression that I did not drink the juice. But it changed my mind about Paradise. There was a completely new substance, like a new and parallel universe, I dare say, even though they call it apple juice.

Then I also better understood why it was so wrong for Adam and Eve to eat from the famous tree. I ate and what did I find? That good and evil is such a subjective view. To stay in the grass or to go under the press of an industrial company, what’s a choice? Be eaten by a bee and fly or become a juice, what is a better chance?

There is a comment in the Bible saying that God was not against knowledge at all. He was just opposed to the knowledge of good and evil, the subjective one, because it brings too many mistakes and then only death can come to correct them. 

Adam and Eve were created not for being stupid, they were not less clever than computers, because they were the masters of “yes” and “no”, it has been more like an absolute knowledge, like the impressive binary scale. And each generation has a few geniuses or a great poet to prove it.