Laudator Temporis Acti

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine (1935; rpt. New York: The Ecco Press, 1979), pp. 110-111:

For the Provençal—as for the Italian in a less and, I am told, for the Chinese in a greater measure—Nature is a matter of little squares in the orange, sun-baked earth. … You go out at dawn from your mas that has frescoed walls; between a forgotten shrine that contains a ninth-century Christ and the field from which they are just disinterring the Venus of Arles, who looks upon you with sightless eyes; with a tiny knife before the dawn is up you remove an infinitely tiny but superfluous leaf from a tiny plant; between clods the countenance of everyone of which is as familiar to you as the face of your child and that to-morrow you shall reduce to fine earth, you lead with your hoe threads of water to the base of every plant that is as familiar to you as the clods, your children and the names of your saints, bull-fighters and poets. The sun rises and scorches your limbs whilst you prune your vines; your throat knows the stimulation of the juice of your own grapes that you have pressed, of the oil of the olives you have gathered and crushed, of the herbs you have grown in the mess of pottage of your own beans, of the cheese whose whey was pressed from the milk of your own goats. You lie for your siesta through the torrid heat of the day in the shadows of the cloister of St. Trophime, watching how, in the orange stone of the capitals, Adam delves, Eve spins and the Maries come up from the sea to Arles. You go back to your work past the Greek shadows of the columns of the theatre made by the Phoceans; at the day's ebb in the golden aureoles of the dust you cast your boules between the stone chest that is the tomb of a captain of the tenth legion that had "Valens, Victrix" for its motto, and another stone chest with a curious ribbon pattern that once held the ashes of a paladin who died beside Roland at Roncevaux.