Sublime

Sur les routes et dans les champs couverts de neige, une prune desséchée, une vieille croûte de pain était plus savoureuse qu’ici, dans l’abondance, tout un festin de corporation. Ô vagabondage, liberté, lande éclairée par la lune, piste d’une bête suivie dans l’herbe grise et humide du matin d’un œil circonspect ! Ici, à la ville, chez les

All the same, we cling to our last pleasures as the tree clings to its last leaves.

One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with”; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of

What seems to have happened is that some time between 1700 and 1800, the Japanese collectively gave up the plough in favour of the hoe because people were cheaper to hire than draught animals. This was a time of rapid population expansion, made possible by the high productivity of paddy rice, naturally fertilised by nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria in