"… Creative mobility in this world requires, at crucial moments, the strategic erasure of ethical boundaries. They lose that mobility who cling to beauty, or who suffer from what the poet Czeslaw Milosz has called “an attachment to ethics at the expense of the sacred.” When the pilgrim Tripitaka insists too forcefully on righteous action, his Monkey guide goes home sulking and the pilgrimage collapses. When Monkey persuades him to leave his his unseasoned and abstract sense of shame behind, they cross mountain after mountain… ."