https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eQH0_oo8rw

John Darnielle considers his old homes and what going back to Eden feels like in “Genesis 3:23.”

Track: “Genesis 3:23”
Album: The Life of the World to Come (2009)

Genesis 3:23, in the Bible, is about being cast out of Eden. Adam is banished and the Lord tells him to “cultivate the ground from which he was taken.” It’s short, but there’s a lot going on in that idea. Adam isn’t just forced to leave Eden, he’s given specific instructions about what to do elsewhere. The point is not purely punishment, it’s about gaining purpose from an unfamiliar set of tasks.

“Genesis 3:23,” the Mountain Goats song, is about John Darnielle returning to places in Oregon and California that brought him pain at the time. The character breaks into their old home to see how the current residents live. “Hope that they’re better at it than I was,” they say, in one of the best lines of the last few years of the Goats catalog.

Adam’s removal from Eden is fairly straightforward. In the Bible, it represents the fall of man from grace and the start of mankind’s time as simpler, less holy creatures. Genesis 3:23 specifically suggests something somewhat less total of a destruction by laying out a plan, but it’s still the loss of Eden. John Darnielle frames his own escapes from much worse places around this because there is complexity even in something you hated at the time.

Some people can leave their past entirely behind them and some people can’t. It’s not a secret which kind John Darnielle is, but the perspective he offers sets “Genesis 3:23” apart from nostalgia. It’s not purely bad (even when it was) and it’s not purely good (even when you want it to feel that way in your memory). For your Eden or your North Broadway apartment, John Darnielle offers you the chance to go home again and see how it makes you feel now.