These pictures came to us in the mail. The young girl in the pictures -- now in her 60's -- stopped by with her daughter while I was out front pulling weeds out of our crazy "garden."

What is it about 1949? The people in these pictures display a kind of innocence and optimism that seems to be gone forever. Definitely the lives of children have changed since these children posed for the camera. Children today know so much more than I knew as a child -- and I grew up knowing more than my parents did when they were children.

My parents -- and the people in these pictures -- grew up without television -- and I grew up without the Internet.

But knowledge can't be bad -- right? I believe that. I believe the truth will set you free.

But something real and something beautiful has been lost -- and it was knowing that killed it.

In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve lost their innocence by eating from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Not Good and Evil itself -- but the knowledge of good and evil.

Isn't that what human beings do? Seek knowledge? It's what makes us human.

I've always thought of the story of Adam and Eve as a metaphor for human nature. The Bible tells us that we are all sinners -- and the original sin was that first taste of knowledge. But how could we have done any differently? We're only human after all.

Would any of us trade the Internet -- and all it's brought to the world, and all it's yet to bring -- for the chance to sit in a sunny kitchen or stand in front of a neat hedgerow on a well-trimmed lawn and smile those 1949 smiles -- if even for only one day?

Tempting isn't it?

In 1949, American was perched in front of the greatest economic expansion in the history of the world. We were a young empire in an age when empire fades fast. Why shouldn't these people smile? Why shouldn't they be optimistic.

Well, for one thing, they're African-American. It would be 60 years from this day in 1949 until a man like their father would sit behind the desk in the oval office. My friend, John Harris -- who's lived in East Hollywood for more than 30 years -- tells me that this neighborhood used to be mostly African-American. Slowly, steadily, the character -- the color -- of the neighborhood changed.

And change, like knowledge, is good -- right?

Rilke, the poet, said "beauty is nothing but the start of terror we can hardly bear." Who would not be terrified if all the slow change of the past 60 years happened in an instant?

But 60 years is less than an instant when compared to the universe.

And that's the riddle of human nature. We constantly thirst for the knowledge that feeds on our innocence, yet every day that innocence is reborn. Look at the pictures your friends and family send you today on Facebook. Can't recognize at least something of that same innocence and optimism in their eyes? But if we look back at those same images in 20, 30 or 60 years, how much do you think will be lost?

Adam and Eve ate the fruit that morning in the Garden of Eden (and how like Eden East Hollywood looks in these grainy old photographs!) to bring on the terror of human existence -- a terror we can hardly bear. They did so, I believe, because they had no choice, and because it was the right thing to do.

By eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they sacrificed their own innocence. They brought truth and beauty into the world. It was the moment when the first spark of humanity flared in the heart of a being whose ancestors were "merely" animals, incapable of either innocence or decadence. Incapable of comprehending -- in a human way -- the terrible beauty of existence.

God, I love this dirty town! I love this crazy, catastrophic Eden on the edge of the desert. I love the people in these photographs -- and, by extension, all people.

You see how easy it is? You see how little our differences matter? If I am different from the people in these photographs, then those differences are only on the most shallow, surface level: the color of my skin, my sex, my age. On a fundamental level -- one that stretches back to the Garden, to the first evolutionary spark of consciousness -- I am the same as the young black girl standing in front of the house where I now live.