Reality check …

… Only the Lover Writes | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

To engage in the act of contemplative realism—for indeed all contemplation is realistic in the way Hren describes—is not simply the vocation of the novelist or the monk, but the vocation of all men and women of goodwill. It is the light of a universal call to holiness, laser-focused through the stained-glass window of a literature that strives not towards the functional end of entertainment—though it will, as an accident of its essential characteristics, be as compelling as our most fundamental painful and joyful human experiences—but instead toward unveiling some of that bedrock truth that underlies reality.