"<p>It's better to live on a mountain than in a valley. But how rich the valley is, my soul, how rich.<br />Once I was watching a young chariot, not with my eyes, but with my ears, for there was a wall of boards between us. I had known him long ago: a lad of sixteen, simple-minded, full of a corn-colour glow of the senses, which filled him with a sort of incorruptible gaiety; what he coveted he stole, if he could, without his action being touched; the stern power no more asked him what he had taken from whence or why than it did the bird. I listened to this fowl with my ears; he wanted to talk to his elder waggoner companion, he urged him long, but he did not answer, he was asleep. Then the lad began to sing, "I drink, I always drink, my wife is angry with me..." Of course, he didn't have a drink, by all means he didn't have a wife. He had only desire, desire brings one down, wisdom says; yet desire lifted him up, for there was nothing to bring him down, for he was on the ground from the beginning. And his desire carried him not only to the drink, not only to the wife, but far beyond, when they were old married men quarreling, and the wife was roasting him for the drink.<br />The angel can fly no higher than this male beetle flew from one blade of grass to another.</p>"