From The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell:

The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each other–different as life and death, as day and night. … Nevertheless–and here is a great key to understanding myth and symbol–the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero.

Oh yes. This is precisely why “realism” feels so flat to me: it willfully persists in forgetting about the sublime. Or worse, it pretends no such thing exists. Yuck. That’s no way to live.