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

Corinthians, as Paris TV films him with a telephoto lens-that just can't be. Saint Paul would never
go near Disneyland. Only children, tourists, and visiting Soviet high officials ever go to Disneyland.
Saints do not.
But somehow that biblical material snared my unconscious and crept into my novel, and equally
true, for some reason in 1978 I relived a scene which I described back in 1970. What I am saying is
this: There is internal evidence in at least one of my novels that another reality, an unchanging one,
exactly as Parmenides and Plato suspected, underlies the visible phenomenal world of change, and
11
somehow, in some way, perhaps to our surprise, we can cut through to it. Or rather, a mysterious
Spirit can put us in touch with it, if it wishes us to see this permanent other landscape. Time passes,
thousands of years pass, but at the same instant that we see this contemporary world, the ancient
world, the world of the Bible, is concealed beneath it, still there and still real. Eternally so.
Shall I go for broke and tell you the rest of this peculiar story? I'll do so, having gone this far
already. My novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was released by Doubleday in February of
1974. The week after it was released, I had two impacted wisdom teeth removed, under sodium
pentathol. Later that day I found myself in intense pain. My wife phoned the oral surgeon and he
phoned a pharmacy. Half an hour later there was a knock at my door: the delivery person from the
pharmacy with the pain medication. Although I was bleeding and sick and weak, I felt the need to
answer the knock on the door myself. When I opened the door, I found myself facing a young
woman-who wore a shining gold necklace in the center of which was a gleaming gold fish. For
some reason I was hypnotized by the gleaming golden fish; I forgot my pain, forgot the medication,
forgot why the girl was there. I just kept staring at the fish sign.
"What does that mean?" I asked her.
The girl touched the glimmering golden fish with her hand and said, "This is a sign worn by the
early Christians." She then gave me the package of medication.
In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly experienced
what I later learned is called anamnesis-a Greek word meaning, literally, "loss of forgetfulness." I
remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to
me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I.
We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had
just told me all this, and it was true.
For a short time, as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black
prisonlike contours of hateful Rome. But, of much more importance, I remembered Jesus, who had
just recently been with us, and had gone temporarily away, and would very soon return. My emotion
was one of joy. We were secretly preparing to welcome Him back. It would not be long. And the
Romans did not know. They thought He was dead, forever dead. That was our great secret, our
joyous knowledge. Despite all appearances, Christ was going to return, and our delight and
anticipation was boundless.
Isn't it odd that this strange event, this recovery of lost memory, occurred only a week after Flow
My Tears was released? And it is Flow My Tears which contains the replication of people and
events from the Book of Acts, which is set at the precise moment in time-just after Jesus' death and
resurrection-that I remembered, by means of the golden fish sign, as having just taken place?
If you were me, and had this happen to you, I'm sure you wouldn't be able to leave it alone. You
would seek a theory that would account for it. For over four years now, I have been trying one
theory after another: circular time, frozen time, timeless time, what is called "sacred" as contrasted to
"mundane" time ... I can't count the theories I've tried out. One constant has prevailed, though,
throughout all the theories. There must indeed be a mysterious Holy Spirit which has an exact and
intimate relation to Christ, which can indwell in human minds, guide and inform them, and even
express itself through those humans, even without their awareness.
In the writing of Flow My Tears, back in 1970, there was one unusual event which I realized at