summoned to the stockyards

"Remember that the writers whom we call eternal or simply good and who intoxicate us have one very important characteristic in common: they move you in a certain direction and they summon you there too, and you feel, not with your mind alone, but with your whole being, that they have a goal, like the ghost of Hamlet's father who does not come and trouble the imagination for nothing."

- Chekhov,
from a letter to Alexey Suvorin, Apr. 8, 1892