Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

by Philip K. Dick

Flow my tears, fall from your springs! Exiled forever let me mourn; Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings, There let me live forlorn.

And to him his public existence, his role as worldwide entertainer, was existence itself, period.

I’ve lost the ability to tell what’s good or bad, true or not true, anymore.

“Do you know what you are?” Kathy said. “You’re a very good person. Do you understand that?” He shrugged. Like most truths it was a matter of opinion.

I have gotten myself mixed up with a complicated, peculiar, malfunctioning creature, Jason Taverner said to himself.

Kathy said, “I’m never sure who anybody is.” That, evidently, had to be granted.

Think what I could tell you if, for a moment, you were able to listen. But you can’t listen. It would frighten you, what you might hear. And anyhow, you know everything already.

no rational response was possible. Her irrationality made it so. The terrible power, he thought, of illogic. Of the archetypes.

Down, vain lights, shine you no more! No nights are black enough for those That in despair their lost fortunes deplore. Light doth but shame disclose.

Because her general taste appalled him, it annoyed him that he himself constituted one of her favorites. It was an anomaly which he had never been able to take apart.

I feel the weight of entropy on me now,

Okay, some people lose a creature they love and then go on and transfer that love to another one. But it hurts; it hurts.” “Then why is love so good?” He had brooded about that, in and out of his own relationships, all his long adult life.

When you love you cease to live for yourself; you live for another person.”

“Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it—grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost. You do understand; I know you do. But you just don’t want to think about it. It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Jason, grief is awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness.

But to grieve; it’s to die and be alive at the same time. The most absolute, overpowering experience you can feel, therefore. Sometimes I swear we weren’t constructed to go through such a thing; it’s too much—your body damn near self-destructs with all that heaving and surging. But I want to feel grief. To have tears.”

“Grief reunites you with what you’ve lost. It’s a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that’s going away. In some fashion you split with yourself and accompany it, go part of the way with it on its journey. You follow it as far as you can go.

reality denied comes back to haunt.

“Fear,” Jason said, “can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you’re afraid you don’t commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back.”

The futility of everything, the perpetual impotence of his efforts and intentions

Maybe I am only one of a great number of people leading synthetic lives of popularity, money, power, by means of a capsule. While living actually, meanwhile, in bug-infested, ratty old hotel rooms. On skid row. Derelicts, nobodies. Amounting to zero. But, meanwhile, dreaming.

I know that the stores, the good ones, like what I do. Does everything have to be on a great scale with a cast of thousands? Can’t I lead my little life the way I want to?”

A man, he thought, cries not for the future or the past but for the present.