Like religious people, conventional writers… look upon the human story through a particular narrow lens, not crafted by them and belonging to generations of writers long dead. So conventional writers are no more realists than these fundamentalist Rapture nuts are. The true realists are the lens-breakers, always have been.
“Good Luck is the gayest of all gay girls;
Long in one place she will not stay:
Back from your brow she strokes the curls,
Kisses you quick and flies away.
But Madame Bad Luck soberly comes
And stays—no fancy has she for flitting,—
Snatches of true-love songs she hums,
And sits by your bed, and brings her knitting.”
John Milton Hay | after the German of Heine