Opening paragraphs:
Many years have gone by, years of war and what men call History. Buffeted here and there at random I have not been able to return to my peasants as I promised when I left them, and I do not know when, if ever, I can keep my promise. But closed in one room, a world apart, I am glad to travel in my memory to that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State, eternally patient, to that land without comfort or solace, where the peasant lives out his motionless civilization on barren ground and in remote poverty, and in the presence of of death.
"We are not Christians," they say. "Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli."....
Many years have gone by, years of war and what men call History. Buffeted here and there at random I have not been able to return to my peasants as I promised when I left them, and I do not know when, if ever, I can keep my promise. But closed in one room, a world apart, I am glad to travel in my memory to that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State, eternally patient, to that land without comfort or solace, where the peasant lives out his motionless civilization on barren ground and in remote poverty, and in the presence of of death.
"We are not Christians," they say. "Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli."....
