The Idle Pantheon.

“He is poor, devout, and perpetually in conversation with God, whom he treats less as a deity than as a difficult business partner: a senior associate who is owed deference, addressed constantly, quoted freely and sometimes inaccurately, and held, with great politeness, to account for the state of the books. The conversation is conducted on the road, between a village and a town, behind a horse with opinions, and it has been going on his whole life, through every reversal the management has seen fit to send.

And his dream, the single recurring dream that powers all the arguing: his dream of wealth is not a dream of luxury. No palaces, no feasts, no standing. If he were a rich man, he says, he would sit and study all day, the holy books open, the questions deep, the door of his house open to the learned. He dreams of money the way only a poor man of his tradition can: as the purchase, at last, of the one commodity that was never for sale in his village, which is time, unowed, in which to think.”