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You cannot eat a cluster of grapes at once, but it is very easy if you eat them one by one.
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Misfortune is never invited. And it comes and sits at the table without permission and it eats, leaving nothing but bones.
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Peasants are a rude lot, and hard: life has hardened their hearts, but they are thick and awkward only in appearance; you have to know them. No one is more sensitive to what gives man the right to call himself a man: good-heartedness, bravery and virile brotherhood.
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And at dawn, the drums still beat on the sleepless plain like an unstoppable heart.
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As they say, when a man begins to have bad luck, even clabber can break his head.
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Experience is the cane of the blind.
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At noon, you walk across a river. It is dry, with not this much water: it is just stones and pebbles. But it rains cats and dogs in the mountains, and towards afternoon, the water descends wildly and she ravages all in its path, the madwoman. That is how death comes. Without our expecting it, and we cannot do a thing against it, brothers.
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The sacrifice to Legba was completed;
the Master of the Crossroads had taken the loas' mysterious routes back to his native Guinea. Meanwhile, the feast continued. The peasants were forgetting their misery: dance and alcohol numbed them, carrying away their shipwrecked conscience in the unreal and shady regions where the savage madness of the African gods lay waiting.
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A tree is made to live in peace in the color of day and in friendship with the sun, the wind and the rain. Its roots plunge in thefat fermentation of the soil, sucking in its elemental humors, its fortifying juices. Trees always seem lost in a great tranquil dream. The dark rising sap makes them groan in the warm afternoons. A tree is a living being that knows the course of the clouds and presses the storms because it is full of birds' nests.
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Water. Its sunny track in the plain; its splashing in the garden canal, the sound it makes when in its course it meets the mane ofthe grass; the diluted reflection of the sky together with the fleeting sight of the reeds; the Negresses fill their dripping gourds and their red clay containers; the song of the washerwomen; the gorged fields the tall crops ripening.
