25
" Grover spit expertly between his teeth. " You know, Nerburn," he said, " you're like those treaty negotiators we used to have to deal with. Always in a hurry. Sometimes there are preliminaries." " There are preliminaries and there are evasions," I said. " Look out there." I swept my hand across the blazing, parched horizon. " We've got to get moving if we want to get up there before it's a hundred and ten degrees." " Just relax. He's just doing it the Lakota way, by laying out the history. That's how we remember our history, by telling our story," " But does every story have to start with Columbus?" " Everything starts with Columbus. At least everything to do with white people." " But what's with the French fries?" " He likes to get rid of the salt." " No, the piles. First he insists on getting exactly twenty-eight, then he divides them into piles. It doesn't make any sense." A small smile crept across Grover's face. " How many piles?" he asked. " Four." He spit one more time onto the ground. It made a small puff of explosion in the dust. " Mmm. Twenty-eight French fries. Four piles of seven." He made a great charade of counting on his fingers. " Let's see. Four seasons. Four directions. Four stages of life. " Seven council fires. Seven sacred rituals. The moon lives for twenty-eight days. Yeah, I guess that doesn't make any sense." " That's crazy," I said. " What is it? Some kind of Lakota French fry rosary? "
30
" Before researchers become researchers they should become philosophers. They should consider what the human goal is, what it is that humanity should create.Doctors should first determine at the fundamental level what it is that human beings depend on for life...
Modern scientific agriculture, on the other hand, has no such vision. Research wanders about aimlessly, each researcher seeing just one part of the infinite array of natural factors which affect harvest yields.
Even though it is the same quarter acre, the farmer must grow his crops differently each year in accordance with variations in weather, insect populations, the condition of the soil, and many other natural factors. Nature is everywhere in perpetual motion; conditions are never exactly the same in any two years.
Modern research divides nature into tiny pieces and conducts tests that conform neither with natural law nor with practical experiences. The results are arranged for the convenience of research, not according to the needs of the farmer. "
― Masanobu Fukuoka , The One-Straw Revolution
36
" Get married, my friend, you don't know what it means to live alone, at my age. Nowadays feeling alone fills me with appalling anguish; being alone at home, by the fire, in the evening. It seems to me then that I'm alone on the earth, dreadfully alone, but surrounded by indeterminate dangers, by unknown, terrible things; and the wall, which divides me from my neighbour, whom I do not know, separates me from him by as great a distance as that which separates me from the stars I see through my window. A kind of fever comes over me, a fever of pain and fear, and the silence of the walls terrifies me. It is so profound, so sad, the silence of the room in which you live alone. It isn't just a silence of the body, but a silence of the soul, and, when a piece of furniture creaks, a shiver runs through your whole body, for in that dismal place you expect to hear no sound. "
― Guy de Maupassant , Bel-Ami
37
" I used to walk out, at night, to the breakwater which divides the end of the harbor form the broad moor of the salt marsh. There was nothing to block the wind that had picked up speed and vigor from its Atlantic crossing. I’d study the stars in their brilliant blazing, the diaphanous swath of the milk Way, the distant glow of Boston backlighting the clouds on the horizon as if they’d been drawn there in smudgy charcoal. I felt, perhaps for the first time, particularly American, embedded in American history, here at the nation’s slender tip. Here our westering impulse, having flooded the continent and turned back, finds itself face to face with the originating Atlantic, November’s chill, salt expanses, what Hart Crane called the “unfettered leewardings,” here at the end of the world. "
― Mark Doty , Heaven's Coast: A Memoir