In the latest issue of Harper's John Leonard quotes from Emmanuel Carrère's new book I Am Alive And You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick: "What [Dick] asked of culture, psychoanalysis, and even religion, was not that they educate him but that they hand over the password that would permit him to escape from the cave wherein we are shown not the real world but only its shadows". That pretty much sums up Dick's attitude toward the cosmos.
Bear in mind, though, that Dick was admitted to a hospital after completing his novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer because, he claimed in an interview, the pain of leaving his characters behind incurred physical illness. Then he mentioned that he lived on nothing but potassium tablets and Scotch while he was writing. Then he died.
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