While I have no right, as an academic might, to claim any lock on wisdom, the point, it seems to me, of good writing, if taken to its conclusion, is the work of the adept, the lama, those reincarnated enough times that like Buddha they would have a grasp of everything from the highest nuclear physics on down. The writer himself is not an adept, but allows and runs enough experiments of observation and humoring the variety of experiences he has at his grasp, studying them, if he is sensitive, in the cortex of his subconscious, that he might be ultimately able to make educated guesses in the direction of knowledge of, say, a higher spiritual being. The writer's vision will always be reinforced by the fact that he is drawn to things he is not able to understand, such that he might spend a lifetime pondering and portraying them. Through his experiments, if not by his intellect alone, nor by his own personal feelings, he will come upon some form of higher wisdom, even if he is left unsatisfied by it until he learns he must accept it.

One had a sense that David Foster Wallace was at this sort of thing. You could see it in his sketches of state fairs and cruise ship vacations. There was the sense to his work that he could take the things of the common, by understanding them on their own terms be able to bring, or at least ask for, a sense of overall moral purpose or placement. One had a sense that he was in pursuit of a beatitude when it came to such things as those he wrote about. And indeed, come to find out, this was basically what he was working on in his story of IRS clerks, a conversion of the suffering of boredom into something worth elation and beauty.

Perhaps that is a perilous line to walk if readers aren't willing to ask big questions of what they read. It would be easy and normal to say, 'but that is not our place, to ask for meaning out of that which is difficult to understand,' or, 'how would we ever now?' You can't blame people who don't want to accept from outside the work of experimentations and conclusions, like the horse is brought to water, take it or leave it. (Carver has a good sense of this issue of believing, drawn so well in his work.) Yet writing always seems to lead to fundamental questions, ones of how we cope with what is mystery or suffering or fear of unknowns and death and loss, as if something deep in the universe were asking us, then showing us, that there is a point to all this.

Writers, just as philosophers have been doing, have been asking questions, portraying interesting situations that have their basis and their truth in real life and experience, for a long time. No one wants to say, of course, that there are final answers, that the life of St. Francis tells us all we ever need know; that would wreck the fun of stumbling through our own lives, and such also comes across as too simple. Who, in our multi-multi societies would be willing to accept a common truth.

Yet, maybe for the writer, it is good work to acknowledge the simple true things that save us from depression, that there is light in the world, that there is good in the world, that we can do it, that in our own small way we have the power to make our neighbor's lives and those of the connected beings of the world, human, animal, creature, and so on, better and happier and more pleasant. It is simple scientific work, and it must be done, to show that we not fear anything.