Small small joys— I won't buy them anymore, not even by mistake. Girls come from villages to visit the city; they buy glass bangles, red lac, and firefly-dots. No sooner do they arrive in the city than they take everything— the middlemen and moneylenders on the branches.
Joy—yes, I came to the city to buy joy by the measure. Like the eastern sky stained with vermillion, or filled with the murmuring fragrance of roses, the whole body-mind, every pore... will swell with that joy, will burst; like chicks hatching from brooded eggs, or linseed pods bursting in the sun's heat... Ah, all these joys—their colors fade in two days!
Like stale puffed rice the soul grows weary and spent; now I'll go to the market, crossing every lane, paying the price of much sorrow to buy the greatest joy of all; the whole market will then be my estate!
Joy! Ah, the great joy! My heart will stay full for all of life. That burning heat will never cool, never end, and storm-rain will never bare its teeth again.
So many heaps of ash, buried earth; beneath them the embryo of a fallen seed will germinate, will make me bloom... I'll sway then in joy like a rosebud.
Here and there the trade in cheap joy... goes on always, goes on forever; whatever can be bought, the joy in it is always somehow a little less!