Harp Farmer Quotes

I seemed to be walking on and on forever through a peaceful, languid garden of rice paddies. This was no longer the territory of savages, but of an ancient and high civilization. Here and there farmers were plowing their fields, using water buffaloes. As a buffalo started to move, snowy herons would fly down and perch on its back and horns. But they flew away again in fright whenever a buffalo reached the edge of the field the farmer turned his plow. Once, as I was walking along, a moist wind began to blow and the sky quickly filled with black clouds. Herons were tossing in the wind like downy feathers. Soon the rain came. Rainfall in Burma is violent. Before I knew it, I was shut in by a thick spray. I could hardly breathe--I felt as if I were swimming. After a while the rain stopped and the sky cleared. All at once the landscape brightened and a vast rainbow hung across the sky. The mist was gone, as if a curtain had been lifted. And there, under the rainbow, the farmers were singing and plowing again.

There are many more ways we can adapt. For example, instead of using up our energies harping about big farmers (whom of course we need right now to provide enough food for all of us), buy your own little patch of land to turn into an oasis of food and wildlife abundance. More and more people are doing this rather than standing around wringing their hands about global warming. Your little sanctuary will not be prone to disappear when the inevitable financial crises hit the big commercial farms.

She lit a candle and set it down at the altar amid a sea of tiny flames. Each of them the same, as if all the dreams and desires of people were indistinguishable from one another. The prayer of a female poet, perhaps the only one in Eivar, no different from a mother’s prayer for her sickening infant or a farmer’s prayer for a good harvest.

There were more beautiful girls, too, who always seemed stickier than other people, easier to snare, as if made of Velcro—the pale-haired dancer whose feet twitched as she slept; the radish farmer who could say thread in seven languages; the anthropology student with exactly seventy-five brown freckles on each cheek. More and more and more small hooks on which his thread caught and stretched outward from his body. More harp strings that yanked him here or there, which grew tighter the farther he moved from whatever or whomever he was tied to. The Thread