Wheat Field Quotes

So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near-- Ah," said the fox, "I shall cry." It is your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you . . ." Yes, that is so," said the fox. But now you are going to cry!" said the little prince. Yes, that is so," said the fox. Then it has done you no good at all!" It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat fields.

There are times when solitude is better than society, and silence is wiser than speech. We should be better Christians if we were more alone, waiting upon God, and gathering through meditation on His Word spiritual strength for labour in his service. We ought to muse upon the things of God, because we thus get the real nutriment out of them. . . . Why is it that some Christians, although they hear many sermons, make but slow advances in the divine life? Because they neglect their closets, and do not thoughtfully meditate on God's Word. They love the wheat, but they do not grind it; they would have the corn, but they will not go forth into the fields to gather it; the fruit hangs upon the tree, but they will not pluck it; the water flows at their feet, but they will not stoop to drink it. From such folly deliver us, O Lord. . . .

My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens: men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain fields down yonder? [...] The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back to the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wheat in the wind...

As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: 'Love has no ending. 'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, 'I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.

For years now I've kind of operated under an informal shopping cycle. A bit like a farmer's crop rotation system. Except, instead of wheat, maize, barley, and fallow, mine pretty much goes clothes, makeup shoes, and clothes (I don't bother with fallow). Shopping is actually very similar to farming a field. You can't keep buying the same thing, you have to have a bit of variety. Otherwise you get bored and stop enjoying yourself.

Why, Yrael?” it said, as the last of the dark gave way to silver, and the shining sphere of metal sank slowly to the ground. “Why?” “Life,” said Yrael, who was more Mogget than it ever knew. “Fish and fowl, warm sun and shady trees, the field mice in the wheat, under the cool light of the moon.

You see the wheat fields over there? I don't eat bread. For me, wheat is of no use whatever. Wheat fields say nothing to me. Which is sad. But you have hair the color of gold. So it will be wonderful, once you've tamed me! The wheat, which is golden, will remind me of you. And I'll love the sound of the wind in the wheat...

you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat...

To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world..." But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life . I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat..." The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time. "Please, tame me!" he said.

Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, Beasts of every land and clime, Hearken to my joyful tidings Of the golden future time. Soon or late the day is coming, Tyrant Man shall be o'erthrown, And the fruitful fields of England Shall be trod by beasts alone. Rings shall vanish from our noses, And the harness from our back, Bit and spur shall rust forever, Cruel whips shall no more crack. Riches more than mind can picture, Wheat and barley, oats and hay, Clover, beans, and mangel-wurzels, Shall be ours upon that day. Bright will shine the fields of England, Purer shall its water be, Sweeter yet shall blow its breezes On the day that sets us free. For that day we all must labour, Though we die before it break; Cows and horses, geese and turkeys, All must toils for freedom's sake. Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, Beasts of every land and clime, Hearken well and spread my tidings Of the golden future time.

Nothing's perfect," sighed the fox. "My life is monotonous. I hunt chickens; people hunt me. All chickens are just alike, and all men are just alike. So I'm rather bored. But if you tame me, my life will be filled with sunshine. I'll know the sound of footsteps that will be different from all the rest. Other footsteps send me back underground. Yours will call me out of my burrow like music. And then, look! You see the wheat fields over there? I don't eat bread. For me, wheat is no use whatever. Wheat fields say nothing to me. Which is sad. But you have hair the color of gold. So it will be wonderful, once you've tamed me! The wheat, which is golden, will remind me of you. And I'll love the sound of the wind in the wheat...

She stood out like a sunflower in a field of wheat.

You can’t come in without an invitation.” He leans a shoulder against Alison’s framed photo of a wheat field at harvest. “That so?” His boot heel nudges the door behind him, shutting out the storm and the scent of rain. “Last I checked, I wasn’t a vampire,” he says, his voice low. My fists clench tighter, and I step backward onto the line of carpet that borders the edge of the living room. “You sure have a lot in common with one.” “Because I suck?” “More proof. You just read my mind.

Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. "It was great," he recalled. "I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the whole field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat.

I wrote too many poems in a language I did not yet know how to speak But I know now it doesn't matter how well I say grace if I am sitting at a table where I am offering no bread to eat So this is my wheat field you can have every acre, Love this is my garden song this is my fist fight with that bitter frost tonight I begged another stage light to become that back alley street lamp that we danced beneath the night your warm mouth fell on my timid cheek as i sang maybe i need you off key but in tune maybe i need you the way that big moon needs that open sea maybe i didn't even know i was here til i saw you holding me give me one room to come home to give me the palm of your hand every strand of my hair is a kite string and I have been blue in the face with your sky crying a flood over Iowa so you mother will wake to Venice Lover, I smashed my glass slipper to build a stained glass window for every wall inside my chest now my heart is a pressed flower and a tattered bible it is the one verse you can trust so I'm putting all of my words in the collection plate I am setting the table with bread and grace my knees are bent like the corner of a page I am saving your place

It has done me good,” said the fox, “because of the color of the wheat fields.

Colonel Matterson reading from wrinkled scripture of that long yellow hand: The flag is America. America is the plum. The peach. The watermelon. America is the gumdrop. The pumpkin seed. America is television. Now, the cross is Mexico. Mexico is the walnut. The hazelnut. The acorn. Mexico is the rainbow. The rainbow is wooden. Mexico is wooden. Now, the green sheep is Canada Canada is the fir tree. The wheat field. The calendar. The night is the Pacific Ocean.

Lawrence has a wonderful hill in it, with a university on top and the first time I ran away from home, I ran up the hill and looked across the world: Kansas wheat fields and the Kaw River, and I wanted to go some place, too. I got a whipping for it.

The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.

The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads.

I have never been much of a patriot. My father would not have allowed such a thing while he lived, and his death insured that his wish was carried out. Piter commanded far more affection and loyalty from me than the nation as a whole. But that night, running across the unplowed fields of winter wheat, with the Fascist invaders behind us and the dark Russian woods before us, I felt a surge of pure love for my country. We ran for the forest, crashing through the stalks of wheat, beneath the rising moon and the stars spinning farther and farther away, alone beneath the godless sky.

August was almost over. The first cool touch of autumn moved slowly through the town and there was a softening and the first gradual burning fever of color in every tree, a faint flush and coloring in the hills, and the color of lions in the wheat fields. Now the pattern of days was familiar and repeated like a penman beautifully inscribing again and again, in practice, a series of it’s and w’s and m’s, day after day the line repeated in delicate rills.

And when the hour of his departure drew near-- "Ah," said the fox, "I shall cry." "It is your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you . . ." "Yes, that is so," said the fox. "But now you are going to cry!" said the little prince. "Yes, that is so," said the fox. "Then it has done you no good at all!" "It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat fields." And then he added: "Go and look again at the roses. You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world. Then come back to say goodbye to me, and I will make you a present of a secret." The little prince went away, to look again at the roses. .... And he went back to meet the fox. "Goodbye," he said. "Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." "What is essential is invisible to the eye," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember. "It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important." "It is the time I have wasted for my rose--" said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember. "Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose . . ." "I am responsible for my rose," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

Reardan is the rich white farm town that sits in the wheat fields exactly 22 miles away from the Rez. And it's a hick town I suppose filled with farmers and rednecks and racists cops who stop every Indian that drives through. During one week when I was little dad got stopped three times for DWI- Driving While Indian.

I know where the Iberian Peninsula is, Iris.” “I know, I know, you probably built the first road or furrowed the first wheat field ever sown there.” “Brat.” “Cradle robber.” “Grave robber.

The man is interested in the sowing of wheat in the field; the woman in making the bread.

As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: "Love has no ending. "I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, "I'll love till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky. "The years shall run like rabbits, For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages, And the first love of the world." But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: "O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time. "In the burrows of the Nightmare Where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow And coughs when you would kiss. "In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy Tomorrow or today. "Into many a green valley Drifts the appalling snow; Time breaks the threaded dances And the diver's brilliant bow. "O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed. "The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead. "Where the beggars raffle the banknotes And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer, And Jill goes down on her back. "O look, look in the mirror, O look in your distress; Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless. "O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbor With all your crooked heart." It was late, late in the evening, The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming, And the deep river ran on.

I expect it's hard for witches ... now that most people work in shops and factories, and haven't any crops to ruin. They must be terribly sad, those witches, to have to go from blighting wheat fields to blighting houseplants.

Even the air of this country has a story to tell about warfare. It is possible here to lift a piece of bread from a plate and following it back to its origins, collect a dozen stories concerning war-how it affected the hand that pulled it out of the oven, the hand that kneaded the dough, how war impinged upon the field where wheat was grown.

Bakers can’t bake bread because they can’t get flour. So why do people burn wheat fields and kill bakers when it’s their fault there’s no flour?

I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you...I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours...after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes...then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

As I walked out one harvest night About the stroke of One, The Moon attained to her full height Stood beaming like the Sun. She exorcised the ghostly wheat To mute assent in Love's defeat Whose tryst had now begun. The fields lay sick beneath my tread, A tedious owlet cried; The nightingale above my head With this or that replied, Like man and wife who nightly keep Inconsequent debate in sleep As they dream side by side. Your phantom wore the moon's cold mask, My phantom wore the same, Forgetful of the feverish task In hope of which they came, Each image held the other's eyes And watched a grey distraction rise To cloud the eager flame. To cloud the eager flame of love, To fog the shining gate: They held the tyrannous queen above Sole mover of their fate, They glared as marble statues glare Across the tessellated stair Or down the Halls of State. And now cold earth was Arctic sea, Each breath came dagger keen, Two bergs of glinting ice were we, The broad moon sailed between; There swam the mermaids, tailed and finned, And Love went by upon the wind As though it had not been. - Full Moon

Now, what is food? Why is food so important? Why do human beings need so much of it - three times a day, every day, year after year? Why do they live on food instead of on something else? Wouldn't it be better if human beings didn't need food at all? Wouldn't it be better if they could live on air, for instance? Get stronger and bigger by breathing sea air, or the air of the mountains, or the forests, or the meadows, or the vineyards and orchards, the wheat fields, the gardens all over the world? Wouldn't that be a better way for men to stay alive? (spoken by 10-year-old Aram Saroyan)

If you stand in a wheat field at this time of year, a few weeks from harvest, it's not hard to imagine you're looking at something out of mythology: all this golden sunlight brought down to earth, captured in kernels of gold, and rendered fit for mortals to eat. But of course this is no myth at all, just the plain miraculous fact.

The biggest spur to my interest in art came when I played van Gogh in the biographical film Lust For Life. The role affected me deeply. I was haunted by this talented genius who took his own life, thinking he was a failure. How terrible to paint pictures and feel that no one wants them. How awful it would be to write music that no one wants to hear. Books that no one wants to read. And how would you like to be an actor with no part to play, and no audience to watch you. Poor Vincent—he wrestled with his soul in the wheat field of Auvers-sur-Oise, stacks of his unsold paintings collecting dust in his brother's house. It was all too much for him, and he pulled the trigger and ended it all. My heart ached for van Gogh the afternoon that I played that scene. As I write this, I look up at a poster of his "Irises"—a poster from the Getty Museum. It's a beautiful piece of art with one white iris sticking up among a field of blue ones. They paid a fortune for it, reportedly $53 million. And poor Vincent, in his lifetime, sold only one painting for 400 francs or $80 dollars today. This is what stimulated my interest in buying works of art from living artists. I want them to know while they are alive that I enjoy their paintings hanging on my walls, or their sculptures decorating my garden

I had never seen a moon like that before. It was no Mercury dime New York moon, but a harvest moon brought all the way from the wheat fields of North Dakota to shine with sweet benevolence down on the chosen and the beautiful.

The old gods are everywhere,” she says. “They swim in the river, and grow in the field, and sing in the woods. They are in the sunlight on the wheat, and under the saplings in spring, and in the vines that grow up the side of that stone church. They gather at the edges of the day, at dawn, and at dusk.

Today the Somme is a peaceful but sullen place, unforgetting and unforgiving. ... To wander now over the fields destined to extrude their rusty metal fragments for centuries is to appreciate in the most intimate way the permanent reverberations of July, 1916. When the air is damp you can smell rusted iron everywhere, even though you see only wheat and barley.

To think of the Midwest as a whole as anything other than beautiful is to ignore the extraordinary power of the land. The lushness of the grass and trees in August, the roll of the hills (far less of the Midwest is flat than outsiders seem to imagine), the rich smell of soil, the evening sunlight over a field of wheat, or the crickets chirping at dusk on a residential street: All of it, it has always made me feel at peace. There is room to breathe, there is a realness of place. The seasons are extreme, but they pass and return, pass and return, and the world seems far steadier than it does from the vantage point of a coastal city. Certainly picturesque towns can be found in New England or California or the Pacific Northwest, but I can't shake the sense that they're too picturesque. On the East Coast, especially, these places seem to me aggressively quaint, unbecomingly smug, and even xenophobic, downright paranoid in their wariness of those who might somehow infringe upon the local charm. I suspect this wariness is tied to the high cost of real estate, the fear that there might not be enough space or money and what there is of both must be clung to and defended. The West Coast, I think, has a similar self-regard...and a beauty that I can't help seeing as show-offy. But the Midwest: It is quietly lovely, not preening with the need to have its attributes remarked on. It is the place I am calmest and most myself.

She was a whirlwind of steel and blood. As he watched her cut through the men as though they were stalks of wheat in a field, he understood how she had gotten so close to touching Endovier's wall that day. And at last-after all these months-he saw the lethal predator he'd expected to find in the mines. there was nothing human in her eyes, nothing remotely merciful. It froze his heart.

The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads. The shape of that dent lasts only a moment, and is as close as anyone gets to seeing wind.

The church by and large is sitting back while we allow 15 percent of the population—the liberal media, college professors, and press—to undermine our faith and brainwash the next generation with their ungodly propaganda. Evolution, abortion, and the destruction of traditional marriage are deadly tares in the wheat field and poison in the drinking water.

The heaven of a grasshopper is the wheat field; the heaven of man is the same place, the very earth itself where we get our food and build our happiness!

He looked as lonely and innapropriate as a seagull in a wheat field.

Sometimes when the Spirit of God was striving and calling so plainly, I would yield and say, 'Yes, Lord; I will go.' The glory of God came upon me like a cloud, and I seemed to be carried away hundreds of miles and set down in a field of wheat, where the sheaves were falling all around me. I was filled with zeal and power, and felt as if I could stand before the whole world and plead with dying sinners. It seemed to me that I must leave all and go at once. Then Satan would come in like a flood and say, 'You would look nice preaching, being a gazing-stock for the people to make sport of. You know you could not do it.' Then I would think of my weakness and say, 'No; of course I cannot do it.' Then I would be in darkness and despair. I wanted to run away from God, or I wished I could die; but when I began to look at the matter in this way, that God knew all about me, and was able and willing to qualify me for the work, I asked Him to qualify me for the work. I ASKED HIM TO QUALIFY ME.

Today the main economic assets consist of technical and institutional knowledge rather than wheat fields, gold mines, or even oil fields, and you just cannot conquer knowledge through war.

Mother, he is a gentleman. He is a builder with bricks of moonlight. He knows the secret places of the earth. He washes the sleep from the eyes of the souls. He lets them look on beauty. He lets them tell him they hate him. In the mornings, I gather berries and apples. I scrub his back with rind. I weave spider-spit, eyelash. He talks in his sleep: pudding, fire, discus, the things he misses. He breathes, Your body is my orchard. I am undulating grass. I am a field of wheat he parts with his fingers. Poppies bloom in my veins. When he kisses me, he tastes pomegranate. The night crawls nearer. The moans of the dead roll and swell. Mother, we are well.

Why were you born when the snow was falling? You should have come to the cuckoo's calling, Or when grapes are green in the cluster, Or, at least, when the lithe swallows muster For their far off flying From the summer dying. Why did you die when the lambs were cropping? You should have died at the apples' dropping, When the grasshopper comes to trouble, And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble, And all winds go sighing For sweet things dying.

I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat...

The thralls went to work, cutting through the wheat like it was wrapping paper. In a matter of minutes, they had reaped the entire field. "Amazing!" said Red. "Hooray!" said Tattoo. The other thralls cheered and hooted. "We can finally have water!" said one. "I can eat lunch!" said another. "I have needed to pee for five hundred years!" said a third. "We can kill these trespassers now!" said a fourth. I hated that guy.

Stewart got out of the truck and walked into the wheat field he’d parked beside. The stalks grew higher the deeper into the field he went. He continued walking. The stalks were slightly taller than his waist, but he still didn’t know what to say.

Cooking gives you the opportunity to meet the things you eat. You can touch each carrot or olive and get to know its smell and texture.You can feel its weight and notice its color and form. If it is going to become part of you, it seems worthy, at least, of acknowledgment, respect, and thanks. It takes much time and care in order for things to grow, and many labors are needed to bring these ingredients to the kitchen. There is a lot to be grateful for that takes place between the wheat field and the dumpling.

I am made to sow the thistle for wheat; the nettle for a nourishing dainty I have planted a false oath in the earth, it has brought forth a poison tree I have chosen the serpent for a councellor & the dog for a schoolmaster to my children I have blotted out from light & living the dove & the nightingale And I have caused the earthworm to beg from door to door I have taught the thief a secret path into the house of the just I have taught pale artifice to spread his nets upon the morning My heavens are brass my earth is iron my moon a clod of clay My sun a pestilence burning at noon & a vapor of death in night What is the price of Experience do men buy it for a song Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No it is bought with the price Of all that a man hath his house his wife his children Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy And in the withered field where the farmer plows for bread in vain It is an easy thing to triumph in the summers sun And in the vintage & to sing on the waggon loaded with corn It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer To listen to the hungry ravens cry in wintry season When the red blood is filled with wine & with the marrow of lambs It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements To hear a dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughter house moan To see a god on every wind & a blessing on every blast To hear the sounds of love in the thunder storm that destroys our enemies house To rejoice in the blight that covers his field, & the sickness that cuts off his children While our olive & vine sing & laugh round our door & our children bring fruits and flowers Then the groans & the dolor are quite forgotten & the slave grinding at the mill And the captive in chains & the poor in the prison, & the soldier in the field When the shattered bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity Thus could I sing & thus rejoice, but it is not so with me!

Every year, Kansas watches the world die. Civilizations of wheat grow tall and green; they grow old and golden, and then men shaped from the same earth as the crop cut those lives down. And when the grain is threshed, and the dances and festivals have come and gone, then the fields are given over to fire, and the wheat stubble ascends into the Kansas sky, and the moon swells to bursting above a blackened earth. The fields around Henry, Kansas, had given up their gold and were charred. Some had already been tilled under, waiting for the promised life of new seed. Waiting for winter, and for spring, and another black death. The harvest had been good. Men, women, boys and girls had found work, and Henry Days had been all hot dogs and laughter, even without Frank Willis's old brown truck in the parade. The truck was over on the edge of town, by a lonely barn decorated with new No Trespassing signs and a hole in the ground where the Willis house had been in the spring and the early summer. Late summer had now faded into fall, and the pale blue farm house was gone. Kansas would never forget it.

I've never stopped wanting to cross the equator, or touch an elk's horns, or sing Tosca or screw James Dean in a field of wheat. To hell with wisdom. They're all wrong: I'll never be through with my life.

And when you write a poem within the accepted poem-form, making it sound like a poem because a poem is a poem is a poem, you are saying “good morning” in that poem, and well, your morals are straight and you have not said SHIT, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could…instead of sweating out the correct image, the precise phrase, the turn of a thought…simply sit down and write the god damned thing, throwing on the color and sound, shaking us alive with the force, the blackbirds, the wheat fields, the ear in the hand of the whore, sun, sun, sun, SUN!; let’s make poetry the way we make love; let’s make poetry and leave the laws and the rules and the morals to the churches and the politicians; let’s make poetry the way we tilt the head back for the good liquor; let a drunken bum make his flame, and some day, Robert, I’ll think of you, pretty and difficult, measuring vowels and adverbs, making rules instead of poetry.

Now that it’s too late, now that I lie here dying on this bloodstained sand, I finally get it. I understand, now. I understand. I know what he meant. My father told me that to know the enemy is half the battle. I know you, now. That’s right. It’s you. All of you who sit in comfort and watch me die, who see the twitch of my bowels through my own eyes: You are my enemy. Corpses lie scattered around me, gleanings left in a wheat field by a careless reaper. Berne’s body cools beneath the bend of my back, and I can’t feel him anymore. The sky darkens over my head—but no, I think that’s my eyes; Pallas’ light seems to have faded. Every drop of the blood that soaks into this sand stains my hands and the hands of the monsters that put me here. That’s you, again. It’s your money that supports me, and everyone like me; it’s your lust that we serve. You could thumb your emergency cut-off, turn your eyes from the screen, walk out of the theatre, close the book . . . But you don’t. You are my accomplice, and my destroyer. My nemesis. My insatiable blood-crazed god. Ah, ahhh, Christ . . . it hurts.

The forests were crippled, the wheat fields vanished; in place of the grass there reappeared stone and drifting sand. Men perished and moved on, the cities sank back into the sand, the dust settled over them. Thousands of years later Nordic dreamers dug up the petrified culture from the rubble and ashes. Today, the entire picture of the former paradise stands before our eyes as a spent dream which had once produced life, beauty and strength as long as a superior race ruled. It will live again and it will dream again. But as soon as races of a dreamless kind took over and attempted to realize the dream, reality vanished with the dream.

There's immeasurable glory in riding a tractor. You start by taking a lap around the fields, smelling the aroma, admiring the colors, day after day, until one morning everything smells ready, as if it's opened and unfurled, and you ask the wheat, 'Is it time?' And the wheat says, 'Yes, friend, it's time.' And then you know to begin the harvest.

Fiercely intelligent, yet bearing a sensibility far more porous than most, Van Gogh was unable, or unwilling, to abstract his intellect from his body's reality, unwilling to abandon the myriad things, to tame his senses and so stifle the steady eros between his flesh and the flesh of the earth. "Again and again he slides out of himself, through his eyes, to feel the hunkard silence of the olive groves, and to taste the spreading ecstasy of the leaves as they're slowly lit by the climbing sun. And again and again he is invaded, in turn, by the visible -- penetrated by the midday langor of the rolling wheat fields, or by the sullen mood of a neighbor's face. Although he writes often to his brother and a few friends (letters of luminous candor and kindness), it is only in the act of drawing and painting that he is able to give expression to this ongoing intercourse, by offering back to the visible a trace of what the visible steadily pours into his chest. "His paintings, then, are windows through which we look onto an earth no less alive and intelligent than ourselves

Durum semolina, golden wheat wafting in Italian fields. Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness

The unvisited grannies, in stone houses by the wheat field, can't remember their husbands or children. They worry their hands, though, hands that could do with a rinsing. The grannies think: We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is corruption. There isn't as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness.

Start with a girl whose blood has been steeped in Korea for generations, imprinted with Confucianism and shamanism and war. Extract her from the mountains. Plant her in wheat fields between the Red River and the Mississippi. Baptize her. Indoctrinate her. Tell her who she is. Tell her what is real. See what happens. Witness a love affair with freaks, a fascination with hermaphrodites and conjoined twins, a fixation on Pisces and pairs of opposites. Trace a dream that won't die: a vision of an old woman slumped on a bench, her spirit sitting straight out of the body, joined to the corpse at the waist.

Some departure from the norm Will occur as time grows more open about it. The consensus gradually changed; nobody Lies about it any more. Rust dark pouring Over the body, changing it without decay— People with too many things on their minds, but we live In the interstices, between a vacant stare and the ceiling, Our lives remind us. Finally this is consciousness And the other livers of it get off at the same stop. How careless. Yet in the end each of us Is seen to have traveled the same distance—it’s time That counts, and how deeply you have invested in it, Crossing the street of an event, as though coming out of it were The same as making it happen. You’re not sorry, Of course, especially if this was the way it had to happen, Yet would like an exacter share, something about time That only a clock can tell you: how it feels, not what it means. It is a long field, and we know only the far end of it, Not the part we presumably had to go through to get there. If it isn’t enough, take the idea Inherent in the day, armloads of wheat and flowers Lying around flat on handtrucks, if maybe it means more In pertaining to you, yet what is is what happens in the end As though you cared. The event combined with Beams leading up to it for the look of force adapted to the wiser Usages of age, but it’s both there And not there, like washing or sawdust in the sunlight, At the back of the mind, where we live now.

But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life . I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat...

Almost everything people did throughout history was fuelled by solar energy that was captured by plants and converted into muscle power. Human history was consequently dominated by two main cycles: the growth cycles of plants and the changing cycles of solar energy (day and night, summer and winter). When sunlight was scarce and when wheat fields were still green, humans had little energy. Granaries were empty, tax collectors were idle, soldiers found it difficult to move and fight, and kings tended to keep the peace. When the sun shone brightly and the wheat ripened, peasants harvested the crops and filled the granaries. Tax collectors hurried to take their share. Soldiers flexed their muscles and sharpened their swords. Kings convened councils and planned their next campaigns. Everyone was fuelled by solar energy – captured and packaged in wheat, rice and potatoes.

It had taken Jack awhile to get used to Spanish cooking. They never served the great joints of beef, legs of pork and haunches of venison without which no feast was complete in England; nor did they consume thick slabs of bread. They did not have the lush pastures for grazing vast herds of cattle or the rich soil on which to grow fields of waving wheat. They made up for the relatively small quantities of meat by imaginative ways of cooking it with all kinds of spices

The wheat field needs clouds and sunshine. So in this slice of bread there is sunshine, there is cloud, there is the labor of the farmer, the joy of having flour, and the skill of the baker and then—miraculously!—there is the bread. The whole cosmos has come together so that this piece of bread can be in your hand. You don’t need to do a lot of hard work to get this insight. You only need to stop letting your mind carry you away with worrying, thinking, and planning.

Out in the field, sitting on the grass, the hard-core omnivores are hunched around and over the cadaver of a creature they've courageously downed, greedily feasting on its flesh, while furtively looking around in all directions.. one of them has thrown in a few wilted sprigs of asparagus and a bucketful of ketchup to sweeten the deal. The vegetarians have caught an animal, chased her baby over to the omnivores, and are suckling from her nipples, while others feast on a basket of gathered birds eggs. The vegans have just ploughed through a mono crop of wheat, and soy and are enjoying their tofu burgers. Meanwhile those radical fruitarian extremists are in the cherry trees, looking on in wide-eyed bewilderment..

During its sixteen years in the field, it achieved a series of seemingly impossible tasks, culminating with the destruction of a 488-year-old vampire who had been secretly controlling the wheat industry for 252 of those years. Keep in mind that in an episode that occurred in 1980, it took forty-five soldiers to kill a sixty-four-year-old vampire. Gestalt is tough.

Xas was whiteskinned, smooth. Even his mouth was pale, more blurred than coloured, like a wine stain wiped on the mouth of a statue. But Xas was no statue. Sobran could see his blood moving, a vein in the angel's neck that pulsed, and with each pulse variations of brightness in his skin, like cloud shadows passing across a wheat field, each pass of light a surprise. Where his skin was worked, the calluses on his hands, it was the same fleshy rose as the nipples of a darkhaired girl who has never suckled a child.

My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat...

Recently I've been working very hard and quickly; in this way I try to express the desperately fast passage of things in modern life. Yesterday, in the rain, I painted a large landscape with fields as far as the eye can see, viewed from a height, different kinds of greenery, a dark green field of potatoes, the rich purple earth between the regular rows of plants, to one side a field of peas white with bloom, a field of clover with pink flowers and the little figure of a mower, a field of tall, ripe, fawn-coloured grass, then some wheat, some poplars, on the horizon a last line of blue hills at the foot of which a train is passing, leaving an immense trail of white smoke over the greenery. A white road crosses the canvas, on the road a little carriage and some white houses with bright red roofs alongside a road. Fine drizzle streaks the whole with blue or grey lines.

I am talking of a place in India, at least a third of the country, a fertile place, full of rice fields and wheat fields and ponds in the middle of those fields choked with lotuses and water lilies, and water buffaloes wading through the ponds and chewing on the lotuses and lilies. Those who live in this place call it the Darkness. Please understand, Your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness. The ocean brings light to my country. Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well off. But the river brings darkness to India—the black river.

That solar hue, that variegation of gleam and shade, made Don Fabrizio's heart ache as he stood black and stiff in a doorway: this eminently patrician room reminded him of country things; the chromatic scale was the same as that of the vast wheat fields around Donnafugata, rapt, begging pity from the tyrannous sun; in this room, too, as on his estates in mid-August, the harvest had been gathered long before, stacked elsewhere, leaving, as here, a sole reminder in the color of the stubble burned and useless now. The notes of the waltz in the warm air seemed to him but a stylization of the incessant winds harping their own sorrows on the parched surfaces, today, yesterday, tomorrow, forever and forever. The crowd of dancers, among whom he could count so many near to him in blood if not in heart, began to seem unreal, made up of that material from which are woven lapsed memories, more elusive even than the stuff of disturbing dreams.

But clouds bellied out in the sultry heat, the sky cracked open with a crimson gash, spewed flame-and the ancient forest began to smoke. By morning there was a mass of booming, fiery tongues, a hissing, crashing, howling all around, half the sky black with smoke, and the bloodied sun just barely visible. And what can little men do with their spades, ditches, and pails? The forest is no more, it was devoured by fire: stumps and ash. Perhaps illimitable fields will be plowed here one day, perhaps some new, unheard-of wheat will ripen here and men from Arkansas with shaven faces will weigh in their palms the heavy golden grain. Or perhaps a city will grow up-alive with ringing sound and motion, all stone and crystal and iron-and winged men will come here flying over seas and mountains from all ends of the world. But never again the forest, never again the blue winter silence and the golden silence of summer. And only the tellers of tales will speak in many-colored patterned words about what had been, about wolves and bears and stately green-coated century-old grandfathers, about old Russia; they will speak about all this to us who have seen it with our own eyes ten years - a hundred years! - ago, and to those others, the winged ones, who will come in a hundred years to listen and to marvel at it all as at a fairy tale. ("In Old Russia")

I know who you are,” the Chicano said to Thomas. “You’re that Indian guy did all the talking.” “Yeah,” one of the African men said. “You’re that storyteller. Tell us some stories, chief, give us the scoop.” Thomas looked at these five men who shared his skin color, at the white man who shared this bus which was going to deliver them into a new kind of reservation, barrio, ghetto, logging-town tin shack. He then looked out the window, through the steel grates on the windows, at the freedom just outside the glass. He saw wheat fields, bodies of water, and bodies of dark-skinned workers pulling fruit from trees and sweat from thin air. Thomas closed his eyes and told this story.

But it’s not unprocessed grain and grape that we find on the Communion table, it’s bread and wine. Grain and grape come from God’s good earth, but bread and wine are the result of human industry. Bread and wine come about through a cooperation of the human and the divine. And herein lies a beautiful mystery. If grain and grape made bread and wine can communicate the body and blood of Christ, this has enormous implications for all legitimate human labor and industry. The mystery of the Eucharist does nothing less than make all human labor sacred. For there to be the holy sacrament of Communion there must be grain and grape, wheat fields and vineyards, bakers and winemakers. Human labor becomes a sacrament, a farmer planting wheat, a vintner tending vines, a miller grinding wheat, a winemaker crushing grapes, a woman baking bread, a man making wine, a trucker hauling bread, a grocer selling wine. Who knows what bread or what wine might end up on the Communion table as the body and blood of Christ. This is where we discover the holy mystery that all labor necessary for human flourishing is sacred. A farmer plowing his field, a worker in a bakery, a trucker hauling goods, a grocer selling wares—all are engaged in work that is just as sacred as the priest or pastor serving Communion on Sunday. The Eucharist pulls back the curtain to reveal a sacramental world.

I would sooner," she said, "give you a spell against water, that all the world should thirst, than give you a spell against the song of streams that evening hears faintly over the ridge of a hill, too dim for wakeful ears, a song threading through dreams, whereby we learn of old wars and lost loves of the Spirits of rivers. I would sooner give you a spell against bread, that all the world should starve, than give you a spell against the magic of wheat that haunts the golden hollows in moonlight in July, through which in the warm short nights wander how many of whom man knows nothing. I would make you spells against comfort and clothing, food, shelter and warmth, aye and will do it, sooner than tear from these poor fields of Earth that magic that is to them an ample cloak against the chill of Space, and a gay raiment against the sneers of nothingness.

We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way—centred on money or pleasure or ambition—and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown.

Those long uneven lines Standing as patiently As if they were stretched outside The Oval or Villa Park, The crowns of hats, the sun On moustached archaic faces Grinning as if it were all An August Bank Holiday lark; And the shut shops, the bleached Established names on the sunblinds, The farthings and sovereigns, And dark-clothed children at play Called after kings and queens, The tin advertisements For cocoa and twist, and the pubs Wide open all day-- And the countryside not caring: The place names all hazed over With flowering grasses, and fields Shadowing Domesday lines Under wheat's restless silence; The differently-dressed servants With tiny rooms in huge houses, The dust behind limousines; Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word--the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages, Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again. - MCMXIV

I frowned, staring into the eerie blackness along Route 33 truckers always complained about. It is odd how we rarely encounter true darkness. Somewhere, there is always light; a house, a town, headlights. Not here. Just total and complete darkness. I had been on the night run for months, long enough to get accustomed to total darkness if not entirely comfortable with it. What concerned me was the silence. I'd often had to pull over and take a pee along that godforsaken beltway. There were crickets rubbing their legs together in the cotton and wheat, grasshoppers jumping through the corn stalks, and June bugs flittering above the fields. Occasionally while relieving myself I'd even hear a lone armadillo burrowing. Tonight, however, I heard nothing. Less than nothing. Always there existed a strangeness here the truckers talked about, but tonight something had inexplicably hushed the sounds of night and made it stranger. The silence itself was dead; the kind of silence you get high up in the mountains when it snows, hushing the entire world beneath a white blanket. The blanket along Damnation Road was black, and it felt…unnatural." - NIGHT RUN - Bobby Underwood

Now we will live!” This is what the hungry little boy liked to say, as he toddled along the quiet roadside, or through the empty fields. But the food that he saw was only in his imagination. The wheat had all been taken away, in a heartless campaign of requisitions that began Europe’s era of mass killing. It was 1933, and Joseph Stalin was deliberately starving Soviet Ukraine. The little boy died, as did more than three million other people. “I will meet her,” said a young Soviet man of his wife, “under the ground.” He was right; he was shot after she was, and they were buried among the seven hundred thousand victims of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. “They asked for my wedding ring, which I….” The Polish officer broke off his diary just before he was executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. He was one of about two hundred thousand Polish citizens shot by the Soviets or the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War, while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly occupied his country. Late in 1941, an eleven-year-old Russian girl in Leningrad finished her own humble diary: “Only Tania is left.” Adolf Hitler had betrayed Stalin, her city was under siege by the Germans, and her family were among the four million Soviet citizens the Germans starved to death. The following summer, a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive.” She was among the more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans.

Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into a mad act of collective suicide, and therefore forced the most powerful nations on earth to find alternative and peaceful ways to resolve conflicts. Simultaneously, the global economy has been transformed from a material-based economy into a knowledge-based economy. Previously the main sources of wealth were material assets such as gold mines, wheat fields and oil wells. Today the main source of wealth is knowledge. And whereas you can conquer oil fields through war, you cannot acquire knowledge that way. Hence as knowledge became the most important economic resource, the profitability of war declined and wars became increasingly restricted to those parts of the world – such as the Middle East and Central Africa – where the economies are still old-fashioned material-based economies.

What else can one do, when we think of all the things we do not know the reason for, than go look at a field of wheat? The history of those plants is like our own; for aren't we, who live on bread, to a considerable extent like wheat, at least aren't we forced to submit to growing like a plant without the power to move, by which I mean in what way our imagination impels us, and to being reaped when we are ripe, like the same wheat?

Why were you born when the snow was falling? You should have come to the cuckoo’s calling, Or when grapes are green in the cluster, Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster For their far off flying From summer dying. Why did you die when the lambs were cropping? You should have died at the apples’ dropping, When the grasshopper comes to trouble, And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble, And all winds go sighing For sweet things dying.

But he came back to his idea. "My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat . . ." The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.

I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped who struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of the anarchy of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle. I am all that that man was and did become. I see myself, through the painful generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish, clearing the first fields from the forest, making rude tools of stone and bone, building houses of wood, thatching the roofs with leaves and straw, domesticating the wild grasses and meadow roots, fathering them to become the progenitors of rice and millet and wheat and barley and all manner of succulent edibles, learning to scratch the soil, to sow, to reap, to store, beating out the fibers of plants to spin into thread and to weave into cloth, devising systems of irrigation, working in metals, making markets and trade routes, building boats, and founding navigation—ay, and organizing village life, welding villages to villages till they became tribes, welding tribes together till they became nations, ever seeking the laws of things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans might live together in amity and by united effort beat down and destroy all manner of creeping, crawling, squalling things that might else destroy them.

The song continued and in the mists of the strange grove, a woman appeared. Her skin was as dark as the rich harvest earth, and white hair floated around her like a soft cloud in a clear winter sky. She wore a dress made of ice woven with the new blossoms of the first warm days of spring. Her eyes blazed as green as the fair golden days of summer, then turned gold like ripe fields of wheat. They glowed in the dim light as she watched him from her place atop a throne carved fro stone and the roots of a living tree.

Should God forbid the sun to perform its office upon the Sabbath, cut off its genial rays from warming the earth and nourishing vegetation? Must the system of worlds stand still through that holy day? Should He [207] command the brooks to stay from watering the fields and forests, and bid the waves of the sea still their ceaseless ebbing and flowing? Must the wheat and corn stop growing, and the ripening cluster defer its purple bloom? Must the trees and flowers put forth no bud nor blossom on the Sabbath? In such a case, men would miss the fruits

A girl and a boy, sitting lazily cross-legged under a pale green willow, picking at the grass. She is lying with her head in his lap, long red hair fanned against his knee. Her skin is not my unnatural red but like honeyed cream. She grins up at him, his eyes the color of an evergreen forest, of dragonfly wings, his corn-gold, too-long hair falling over his forehead. And she laughs. When she does her back, her throat arches slightly, and he blushes. He smells of wheat fields and fallen autumn apples soft against the earth, and it is a smell she knows like her own. Under the filmy reed-curtain of the old willow tree, they hold hands and talk quietly, shoes discarded like peach pits. The sun is low in the sky, warm and orange-gold on their young faces, their strong white smiles and freshly washed hair. The light spills onto their shoulders like water from a well. There are sharp-smelling rosemary branches braided into her hair, with their little blue blossoms, and the oil is on their brown fingers. The boy whispers something in the girl’s ear, and she closes her eyes, lashes smoking cheekbones like bundles of sage.

the goddess knew that her daughter had been taken, and tore her hair into utter disorder, and repeatedly struck her breasts with the palms of both hands. With her daughter’s location a mystery still, she reproaches the whole earth as ungrateful, unworthy her gift of grain crops, and Sicily more than the others, where she has discovered the proof of her loss; and so it was here that her fierce hand shattered the earth-turning plows, here that the farmers and cattle perished alike, and here that she bade the plowed fields default on their trust by blighting the seeds in their keeping. Sicilian fertility, which had been everywhere famous, was given the lie when the crops died as they sprouted, now ruined by too much heat, and now by too heavy a rainfall; stars and winds harmed them, and the greedy birds devoured the seed as it was sown; the harvest of wheat was defeated by thorns and darnels and unappeasable grasses.

And then there are colors. The truth is that the brain knows far less about colors than one might suppose. It sees more or less clearly what the eyes show it, but when it comes to converting what it has seen into knowledge, it often suffers from one might call difficulties in orientation. Thanks to the unconscious confidence of a lifetime's experience, it unhesitatingly utters the names of the colors it calls elementary and complementary, but it immediately lost, perplexed and uncertain when it tries to formulate words that might serve as labels or explanatory markers for the things that verge on the ineffable, that border on the incommunicable, for the still nascent color which, with the eyes' other bemused approval and complicity, the hands and fingers are in the process of inventing and which will probably never even have its own name. Or perhaps it already does -- a name known only to the hands, because they mixed the paint as if they were dismantling the constituent parts of a note of music, because they became smeared with the color and kept the stain deep inside the dermis, and because only with the invisible knowledge of the fingers will one ever be able to paint the infinite fabric of dreams. Trusting in what the eyes believe they have seen, the brain-in-the-head states that, depending on conditions of light and shade, on the presence or absence of wind, on whether it is wet or dry, the beach is white or yellow or olden or gray or purple or any other shade in between, but then along comes the fingers and, with a gesture of gathering in, as if harvesting a wheat field, they pluck from the ground all the colors of the world. What seemed unique was plural, what is plural will become more so. It is equally true, though, that in the exultant flash of a single tone or shade, or in its musical modulation, all the other tones and shades are also present and alive, both the tones or shades of colors that have already been name, as well as those awaiting names, just as an apparently smooth, flat surface can both conceal and display the traces of everything ever experience in the history of the world. All archaeology of matter is an archaeology of humanity. What this clay hides and shows is the passage of a being through time and space, the marks left by fingers, the scratches left by fingernails, the ashes and the charred logs of burned-out bonfires, our bones and those of others, the endlessly bifurcating paths disappearing off into the distance and merging with each other. This grain on the surface is a memory, this depression the mark left by a recumbent body. The brain asked a question and made a request, the hand answered and acted.

An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one’s mind. Even ten square miles of wheat gladdens the hearts of most . . . No, in the plant world, and especially among the flowering plants, fecundity is not an assault on human values. Plants are not our competitors; they are our prey and our nesting materials. We are no more distressed at their proliferation than an owl is at a population explosion among field mice . . . but in the animal world things are different, and human feelings are different . . . Fecundity is anathema only in the animal. "Acres and acres of rats" has a suitably chilling ring to it that is decidedly lacking if I say, instead, "acres and acres of tulips".

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

The truth of the matter was, that whether a person did good or committed evil was rarely ever due to their inherent nature. Each person was like a plot of farmland; some were lucky, their fields sprinkled with seeds of grains, bearing an abundant harvest come autumn, paddies wafting with the soft fragrance of rice and fields of wheat dancing in the wind like waves, and everything would be good and praise-worthy. But some were not so lucky. Their fields were planted with the seeds of poppy flowers, and the spring breeze brought only the sin of intoxicated dissipation and euphoric decadence, filling the skies and covering the lands with that vile, bloody red and gold. The people abhorred it, cursed it, feared it, even as they indulged in its blissful stupor, rotted away in its filthy stench.

How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

When Radha and I were children, we used to play a game. She would ask, “What is the true color of the world, Didi?” And I would say, “Green.” “Why green?” “Because the trees are green. Grass is green. The new buds on the plants are green. Even the parrots are green. Green is the color of the world.” “But, Didi,” Radha would argue, “the wheat stalks are brown. My body is brown. The field mice are brown. No, the world is brown.” “What about blue?” I would say. “The sky is blue. And it covers the whole world, like a mother who loves and embraces all her children. Radha would fall silent, and I would remember that she had known our mother’s love for even fewer years than I did. So I would take her in my arms and hold her, to make her know what it feels like to be loved. Today I know the truth: The true color of the world is black. Anger is black. Shame and scandal are black. Betrayal is black. Hatred is black. And a roasted, smoking body is Black, Black, Black. The world, after witnessing such cruelty, goes black. The waking up to a changed world is black.

Word from the outside, whether it arrived in a mail sack or a news report, seldom overshadowed the facts of our lives. We talked in facts -- work and weather, the logistics of this fence, that field -- but stories were how we spoke. A good story rose to the surface of a conversation like heavy cream, a thing to be savored and served artfully. Stored in dry wit, wrapped in dark humor, tied together with strings of anecdote, these stories told the chronology of a family, the history of a piece of land, the hardships of a certain year or a span of years, a series of events that led without pause to the present. If the stories were recent, they filtered through the door to my room late at night, voices hushed around the kitchen table as they sorted out this day and held it against others, their laughter sharp and sad and slow to come. Time was the key. Remember the time...and something in the air caught like a whisper. Back when. Back before a summer too fresh and real to talk about, a year's work stripped in a twenty-minute hailstorm; a man's right hand mangled in the belts of a combine, first day of harvest; an only son buried alive in a grain bin, suffocated in a red avalanche of wheat.

With time, the ‘wheat bargain’ became more and more burdensome. Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a series of ‘improvements’, each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers. Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation? For the same reason that people throughout history have miscalculated. People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions. Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work – say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering seeds on the surface – people thought, ‘Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.’ It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan. The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children. Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases. They did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty.