SLSL Intro, "...always at a cost.."

[Mutualcode at aol.com]

"It is simply wrong to begin with a(n)... abstract unifying
agent, and then try to force characters and events to
conform to it." (SL, Intro, p.12)

cf.

"...beginning with something abstract... and only then
going on to try to develop plot and characters." (p.18)

Not quite reification or hypostatization, but close. In 
the examples given, the unifying or progenerative force
takes shape only in its effects on the characters and
events which swirl around it. "It" remains inaccessible.

But there is something within the characters, some
smaller version, perhaps, of that greater unifying abstraction,
which is accessible:

    ...in fact the fiction... that moved and pleased me
    then as now was precisely that which had been made
    luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found
    and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more
    shared levels of the life we all really live. (SL, Intro, p. 21)

cf.

"Hark! Hark! You wonder? That's all?" One of the Enigmata of
the Invisible World, is how a Voice unlocaliz'd may yet act
powerfully as a moral Center.... "What about 'care'? Don't
you care"? [le canard, M&D, p.666]

respecfully