Brook Wilensky-Lanford, from an interview in Religion Dispatches on her new book, Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden (via beingblog)

There’s nothing saying Eden stayed perfect after the Fall. Genesis says God placed a couple of angels with flaming swords outside the gates to protect the Tree of Life, and presumably bar our return, and many assume that the Garden was destroyed in Noah’s Flood, never to be seen again. There’s a small town near the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates today where they have a Tree of Knowledge, now dead, standing in a little cement park. And that’s pretty much how I picture the aftermath of Eden.