"In that flat landscape a man cursing at his horses somewhere off in the fields can be heard a long way. All sounds carry: the dinner bell, wheels crossing a cattle guard, the clatter of farm machinery. When the gasoline engine sputters and dies or the blades of the mowing machine jam, Cletus knows that Mr. Wilson, a quarter of a mile away, has heard it and is waiting for the sound of the engine or the mowing machine to start up again. If it doesn't, he leaves his own work and comes across the pasture to see what the trouble is. With their heads almost touching, his father and Mr. Wilson study the difficulty."
Literature
Virginia Woolf - Two passages from "The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn"
[I]
The state of the times, which my mother tells me, is less safe and less happy than when she was a girl, makes it necessary for us to keep much within our own lands. After dark indeed, and the sun sets terribly soon in January, we have to be safe behind the hall Gates; my mother goes out as soon as the dark makes her embroidery too dim to see, with the great keys on her arm. ‘Is everybody within doors?’ she cries, and swings the bells out upon the road, in case any of our men may still be working in the fields. Then she draws the Gates close, clamps them with the lock, and the whole world is barred away from us. I am very bold and impatient sometimes, when the moon rises, over a land gleaming with frost; and I think I feel the pressure of all this free and beautiful place—all England and the sea, and the lands beyond—rolling like sea waves, against our iron gates, breaking, and withdrawing—and breaking again—all through the long black night. Once I leapt from my bed, and ran to my mother’s room, crying, “Let them in. Let them in. We are starving!’ ‘Are the soldiers there, child,’ she cried: ‘or is it your father’s voice?’ She ran to the window, and together we gazed out upon the silver fields, and all was peaceful. But I could not explain what it was that I heard; and she bade me sleep, and be thankful that there were stout gates between me and the world.
[II]
The dawn, even when it is cold and melancholy, never fails to shoot through my limbs as with arrows of sparkling piercing ice. I pull aside the thick curtains, and search for the first glow in the sky which shows that life is breaking through. And with my cheek leant upon the window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massy wall of time, which is for ever lifting and pulling and letting fresh spaces of life in upon us. May it be mine to taste the moment before it has spread itself over the rest of the world! Let me taste the newest and the freshest. From my window I look down upon the Church yard, where so many of my ancestors are buried, and in my prayer I pity those poor dead men who toss perpetually on the old recurring waters; for I see them, circling and eddying forever upon a pale tide. Let us, then, who have the gift of the present, use it and enjoy it. That, I confess, is part of my morning prayer.
From "Letter to a Hostage" - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“True miracles occur with scant commotion! The important events are quite simple!”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery - from "Letter to a Hostage"
“…lulled by the comings and goings of the deferential maid, we drank with the bargees like worshippers of the same church, although we could not say which one. One of the two bargees was Dutch. The other was German. The latter had previously fled the Nazis, pursued over there for being a Communist, or a Trotskyite, or a Catholic or a Jew. (I cannot recall for which label the man had been outlawed). But at that moment the bargee was far from being just a label. It was the man inside that mattered. The human essence. He was, quite simply, a friend. And we were in agreement, as friends. You agreed. I agreed. The bargees and the maid agreed. Agreed upon what? About the Pernod? About the meaning of life? About how pleasant the day was? We did not know how to express this either. But the depth of this agreement was so fully and solidly established, so biblical in its essence, even though impossible to put into words, that we would have gladly upheld this flag, sustained a siege and died behind machine guns to protect this essence.
What essence…? I have to admit it is difficult to explain! I fear I can only capture the reflections, not the essential elements. The inadequacy of my words will obscure my truth. It would be equivocal to claim that we would have readily fought for a certain quality of the bargees’ smile, and your smile and my smile, and the maid’s smile, which by some miracle of this sun, despite great adversity over so many millions of years, culminated, through us, in the quality of a convincing smile. As often as not the essential is weightless.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery - from "Letter to a Hostage"