Stories like these hover in the air for generations, waiting for some bat-writer to swoop down and gobble them. Paul said an old man had told him the story when he was a boy; and Paul said that the old man said that when he was a boy, an old man had told it to him. So I took the story, with Paul’s permission, and told it in print as a poem, and as a children’s book which must have sold a million copies by now. It’s a tale of work-work-work, of total dispersal and starting again, of human life compared to a perennial plant that dies to rise again.

But the point I want to make about my story concerns attitudes to work. When I had finished the poem-version, published it in the New Yorker, and read it from the platform, I discovered that responses to the poem divided people. Half felt the exhilaration I felt in the ox-cart man’s work-cycle; another half found the story discouraging, all that work and you have to do it over again. Temperament, temperament. Each human division reads the same story; each responds from an opposite place.

November of 1991 Jane and I spent three weeks careering through India talking for USIS. USIS worked us hard: We lectured and gave readings in the morning and late afternoon. At breakfast we were interviewed for newspapers, Jane as early as six o’clock one morning. These interviews were often our own doing not USIS’s: At a reading a young anxious charming Indian would tell us that his newspaper wanted a piece; we would add another interview at 7:30 A.M. In the evenings there were dinner parties with literary and artistic people, beginning with drinks at eight, supper served at ten o’clock. Usually we could nap after lunch.

At dinner parties we met poets, playwrights, actors, academics, and film people. One leading poet was a bank president, another a doctor. One night I had a long conversation with a novelist named Gurcharan Das who is CEO for Procter and Gamble in India; we compared notes on Cincinnati, where I lectured on poetry twenty-five years before, and which he visits quarterly on Procter and Gamble business. He told me a story in order to bring up a subject. A week earlier, he had addressed a conference in Bombay which gathered four hundred young Indian managers for instruction in the ways of business. In the question period one young man raised his hand to ask, “What is contentment?”

The novelist-CEO told me the story because he wanted to talk about contentment. I tell it first—with pleasure in India—as a story about the country: Indians don’t small-talk; they Introduce Topics. (When I met P. Lal, poet and translator, he looked me in the eye and said, “What you think of irony?”) For me, the lesson I learned from Gurcharan Das was not so much the nature of contentment as the nature of Indian managers. If an American junior executive asked such a question in public, would he remain a junior executive?