"W HEN I WAS A BOY, traveling the roads of France with my father—may God have mercy on his soul—and my brother Calvin, we would from time to time overtake a traveling knife-grinder, sweating with the labor of shoving his rig, which was very heavy because of the massive round grindstone. My father, God rest him, was a trader. A merchant. Everything he needed to conduct his business he carried in his head, or in his purse. This Calvin and I considered to be the normal state of affairs. How strange it was, therefore, to see these knife-sharpeners, who could not earn their bread without a great heavy stone! One day Father heard me and Calvin make some mocking comments after we had passed one of these poor hard-working men. He chided us for our arrogance, and gave us a lesson: the grindstone was set in motion by a shove, and kept turning by occasional slaps of the grinder’s hand. If it lacked weight, it would run down so quickly as to be useless. But because of its tremendous mass, it continued to turn with the greatest impetuosity once set in motion. The stone acted, my father said, as a sort of banca, storing up the work that the grinder did sporadically with hand-slaps, and releasing it steadily. This faculty was so essential to the knife-grinder’s work that he willingly pushed that heavy stone up and down hills every day of his life, like Sisyphus.