In Washington, or any other official institutional corporate place, there is a conventional morality that reigns supreme. You don't have to be particularly imaginative. Following a conventional morality is better than following lesser moralities, and there are certainly things to celebrate about the conventional. Indeed, it pays to master the conventional reality, certain of one's judgment within its structure, dismissive of what might fall outside of it. But every now and again, we see in scandal and misjudgment the bastions of this conventional morality, be it in private life or in what they allow the profit-minded to do and get away with when they leave them unchecked, assuming the common morality is stronger than it really is.

It is the writer's job to go beyond conventional morality, to do 'the math' that allows a broader look at things beyond the arguments of the daily business.

In order to write the novel I wrote, I had to inhabit its time frame, so I could work out the details and work on a particular time line, starting here, going there, ending somewhere else. And so, in retrospect, it appears I took a job that allowed me keep close to that world I was writing about. I'm not necessarily proud about it, a certain amount of what another would perceive as 'obsession' and that kind of thing the writer engaged in on a personal level, but I am not judgmental about it. Except that maybe I should get a better job. Who knows, maybe it's not so bad to have a restaurant job, in that once you've done for the night you can for the most part leave it behind. Whether or not this is healthy, who am I to say.

Writers don't mind so much things like exile. They don't mind things that let them see beyond the conventional morality, or beyond the conventional concept of time that is allied to it. A writer of the stature of a Kundera needs that sort of thing, like permanent distance from his country. It makes perfect sense to me that his works are free of the conventions of time and lumping certain matters together while keeping others separate, like a personal history separate from a country's history. His is a healthy approach to the difficult task of occupying a time and a situation, real or created, inhabiting it well enough to go about writing about it. His writing would acknowledge, say, an act like mine, occupying one world, in my case a restaurant job/life, while imaging another, in my case a setting of college days.

Joyce was not one for whom conventional morality was enough. And so in his time lines a Dublin day is expanded and exploded and brought together from distant ends. Or whatever he's doing in that book, Ulysses. Like a cat, the literary mind is capable of great leaps, great identifications, great understandings.

To the point where we begin to find ourselves not as far away as we might have thought from the thinking of a Saint Francis, or a Buddha. Even as one feels a certain sorrow for being in such a position, as if having been relegated to the task. Even as the conventional moralist is uncomfortable associating with such, as if they didn't want to see the fuller picture of a more complete and reaching morality.

It is not easy work, often filled with a kind of chagrin, a loneliness associated with it, one necessary to an ultimate resolution that satisfies the eye, and yet it is natural. Without glorifying it, there is a reason why, when it is done well, occasionally, awards are given out for it.

Anyway, done properly one will feel struck dumb by the awakening, as if by an atom bomb's concentric outward rush, as if by thunder and lightning, as if perhaps by stigmata as it is depicted in great paintings. One wants to sit down on the ground like a child, knowing he will forever be gentle, even if incompetent at modern life, and knowing that at least for the time being conventional morality does not personally suffice, even if he might wish a way back.