The analogy of the writer’s failure to find encouragement from the outside world to some of the challenges faced by the Navy SEAL, the analogy that I was developing yesterday, presupposes a deeper analogy: that of the creative act to the act of war. This can be understood in two ways.

First, insofar as the entire creative process is for the writer, or any artist, a battle with what Steven Pressfield calls, in The War of Art, forces of resistance within, or with what Seth Godin calls the lizard brain. This is a psychological and spiritual war with our fussy and discouraging internal editor, the dispiriting and dissembling Old Scratch who whispers: “This is no good and you’ll never be any good.”

Second, insofar as art in any age is at war with the ambient culture’s attempts, conscious or unconscious, to obfuscate reality. This battle has occurred in every age. Like Socrates the philosophical gadfly, the task of the artist is to help us distinguish being from non-being. Art must entertain and in a certain sense comfort and console, but if it does not also unsettle us, make us uncomfortable, then it is not likely that it is achieving its aim of helping us tear away the crust of convention and habit that keeps us from seeing how the world really is.

For it is only by coming into contact with the real that we also are able to create the beautiful. Truth is beauty and beauty is truth. That is the victory of art.