In his dialogue “Phaedrus”, Plato compares the souls of gods and men, both immortal, to chariots pulled by two horses each.
While both horses of a god are good, a man’s soul is pulled by a good horse and a bad one.
Zeus leads a procession of gods’ and fairies’ chariots, each pulled by two flying horses, to the pinnacle of heaven: their colorless, shapeless and intangible dwelling place.
On the contrary, all men are impeded by the uncontrollable ups and downs of a bad horse that plunge them into a worrisome chaos.
Eventually, men’s souls fall to earth because of the broken wings; it takes a 1,000-year process of reincarnation for the wings to grow back and take them to where they started.

As a grade-school student, I spent a summer at my grandmother’s because my mom was too busy to look after me.
There was an active coal mine by my grandma’s house, which was facing a railroad perched on a river cliff, not far away from a tunnel lined by several steel columns.
Covering the top of the tunnel were some fallen rocks besides a blanket of fern and grass.
On a sweltering summer day, we would always climb down the cliff to take a nap in a huge, cool and dried-up drainage hole, known as the “secret hole”.

And yet, I have never been to that hole ever since my uncle threw into it a trespassing serpent he killed in the house.

At the time, I was quite a good storyteller.
Whenever my teacher was too tired to teach, she would let me tell stories to the class, accompanied by drawings on the blackboard.