And yet, since dignity - understood as recognition - is something that must be conferred, two other assumptions about the human condition must be made: first, homo sapiens are inclined in some respect to regard one another as equals; and second, they cannot live optimally without having some form of relationship with each other. Indeed, both these ideals - that we are an egalitarian and social species - have become so commonplace in many parts of the world as to sound like hackneyed New Age notions.

This point signals the important difference between idealism - when we maintain our values despite the odds - and idealisation - when we deny the odds altogether. To be a good citizen requires that we hold fast to what psychotherapists call ‘the frame’ - the set of conscious routines (for example, the time, duration and confidentiality of sessions) that make therapeutic work possible. In the context of conscious citizenship, it means showing up consistently and tolerating the frequently disabling anxiety that comes with living in this country. Sometimes we are the ones who bring the storm, at other times we are the ones who have to weather it, but we are always involved, implicated. There is not a moment in which something is not being asked of us, whether we are required to give a part of ourselves or receive a part of someone else.

Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.

The key idea here— whether public or private, whether in line with what other people think you should do or not— is the combination of two words: “choosing” and “responsibilities.” My enduring great friend Tom Tierney puts it this way, “What are you doing that meets the ‘but for’ test? What are you getting done that would not otherwise happen ‘but for you’ even if almost no one ever knows about it?”

Laws do not bind our perceptions. There are as many worlds as there are lives. It is not those who have no imagination who are the problem, for we all possess imagination, few of us use it well. The problem is with those who are frightened of the rather limitless validity of the imagination, frightened of people who continually extend the boundaries of the possible, people who ceaselessly redream the world and reinvent existence; frontiers people of the unknown and the uncharted.