"Dick,_Philip_K._I hope I shall arrive soon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

of white beard. What a strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond
ordinary men. Evidently he was a king.
Indeed he was a king. He is Christ Himself returned, to pass judgment. And this is what he does
in my novel: He passes judgment on the man sealed up in darkness. The man sealed up in darkness
must be the Prince of Evil, the Force of Darkness. Call it whatever you wish, its time had come. It
was judged and condemned. Buckman could weep at the sadness of it, but he that the verdict could
not be disputed. And so he rode on, without turning or looking back, hearing only the shriek of fear
and defeat: the cry of evil destroyed.
So my novel contained material from other parts of the Bible, as well as the sections from Acts.
Deciphered, my novel tells a quite different story from the surface story (which we need not go into
here). The real" story is simply this: the return of Christ, now king rather than suffering servant. Judge
rather than victim of unfair judgment. Everything is reversed. The CORE message of my novel,
without my knowing it, was a warning to the powerful: You will shortly be judged and condemned.
Who, specifically, did it refer to? Well, I can't really say; or rather would prefer not to say. I have no
certain knowledge, only an intuition. And that is not enough to go on, so I will keep my thoughts tc.
myself. But you might ask yourselves what political events took place in this country between
February 1974 and August 1974. Ask yourself who was judged and condemned, and fell like a
flaming star into ruin and disgrace. The most powerful man in the world And I feel as sorry for him
now as I did when I dreamed that dream. "That poor poor man," I said once to rn) wife, with tears in
my eyes. "Shut up in the darkness, playing the piano in the night to himself, alone and afraid, knowing
what's to come." For God's sake, let us forgive him, finally. But what was done to him and all his
men-"all the President's men," as it's put-had to be done. But it is over, and he should be let out
into the sunlight again; no creature, no person, should be shui up in darkness forever, in fear. It is not
humane.
Just about the time that the Supreme Court was ruling that the Nixon tapes had to be turned over
to the special prosecutor, I was eating at a Chinese restaurant in Yorba Linda, the town in California
where Nixon went to school-where he grew up, worked at a grocery store, where there is a park
named after him, and of course the Nixon house, simple clapboard and all that. In my fortune cookie,
I got the following fortune:
DEEDS DONE IN SECRET HAVE A WAY OF BECOMING FOUND OUT.
I mailed the slip of paper to the White House, mentioning that the Chinese restaurant was located
within a mile of Nixon's original house, and I said, "I think a mistake has been made; by accident I
got Mr. Nixon's fortune. Does he have mine?" The White House did not answer.
Well, as I said earlier, an author of a work of supposed fiction might write the truth and not know
it. To quote Xenophanes, another pre-Socratic: "Even if a man should chance to speak the most
complete truth, yet he himself does not know it; all things are wrapped in appearances" (Fragment
34). And Heraclitus added to this: "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself" (Fragment
54). W. S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan, put it: "Things are seldom what they seem; skim milk
masquerades as cream." The point of all this is that we cannot trust our senses and probably not even
our a priori reasoning. As to our senses, I understand that people who have been blind from birth
and are suddenly given sight are amazed to discover that objects appear to get smaller and smaller as
they get farther away. Logically, there is no reason for this. We, of course, have come to accept this,
because we are used to it. We see objects get smaller, but we know that in actuality they remain the
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same size. So even th e common everyday pragmatic person utilizes a certain amount of
sophisticated discounting of what his eyes and ears tell him.
Little of what Heraclitus wrote has survived, and what we do have is obscure, but Fragment 54 is
lucid and important: "Latent structure is master of obvious structure." This means that Heraclitus
believed that a veil lay over the true landscape. He also may have suspected that time was somehow
not what it seemed, because in Fragment 52 he said: "Time is a child at play, playing draughts; a