These tales are full of simplicity and music. They represent the literature of a class for which everything in the deep groove of birth, love, pain, and death remains unchanged for centuries; a class that names everything in the heart; for which everything is a symbol.

The villagers have the staff upon which man has relied since the beginning. The city dwellers have machines - prose and ostentation. The villagers live a few simple things in their lives and then endlessly recount them, sitting around the fire.

In our case, nothing manages to acquire meaning; far too many things happen in our lives, so many that not even a large heart can contain them.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]