Spiritual Quote of the Day (Bruce Feiler on Adam and Eve, The First Love Story)

“The most underappreciated aspect of Adam and Eve is how they continually return to each other after periods of separation. They start life united, then Eve goes off alone. She could remain apart but instead returns to Adam. Once out of Eden, they could split, but instead they stay together. After losing a child, they separate and then reunite and have Seth. This togetherness in the face of repeated separateness is their first lesson for us: Learning to mend breaches is central to love.”— American writer and TV personality Bruce Feiler, “Adam and Eve and Us,” The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 11-12, 2017

(The image accompanying this post shows actors Michael Parks and Ulla Bergryd as Adam and Eve in John Huston’s 1966 film, The Bible.)

Quote of the Day (Elie Wiesel, on Adam and How It Is ‘Given to Man to Begin Again’)

“It is not given to man to begin; that privilege is God's alone. But it is given to man to begin again—and he does so every time he chooses to defy death and side with the living.  Thus he justifies the ancient plan of the most ancient of men, Adam, to whom we are bound both by the anguish that oppressed him and the defiance that elevated him above the paradise we shall never enter.”—Romanian-born American Jewish Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Holocaust survivor and human-rights activist Elie Wiesel (1928-2016), Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends (1976)

Quote of the Day (James Morris, on the First Travelers, Adam and Eve)

“Travel began as a precise landlord's retribution, and no matter how plush the circumstances of movement have become, lodged still in travel's DNA are the traces of a sweet deal gone sour: The big plane will shudder, the high-decked ship rock, the Segway reverse course. And physical shocks are the least of it. Our errant first parents had only each other to endure. But we move in the company of ... others, and it costs us. The assorted penalties of contemporary travel are evidence of how long the Almighty can hold a grudge.”—James Morris, on how Adam and Eve became the first travelers, in “Off the Road: When Did the Travel Bug Become Such a Plague?” The Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2007

(The image accompanying this post comes from The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, a fresco by the Italian Early Renaissance artist Masaccio, painted around 1425 on the walls of the Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence.)