A Scanner Darkly

by Philip K. Dick

“How come you do this stuff?” Hank had asked him. What did any man, doing any kind of work, know about his actual motives? Boredom, maybe; the desire for a little action. Secret hostility toward every person around him, all his friends, even toward chicks. Or a horrible positive reason: to have watched a human being you loved deeply, that you had gotten real close to, held and slept with and kissed and worried about and befriended and most of all admired—to see that warm living person burn out from the inside, burn from the heart outward.

IF I HAD KNOWN IT WAS HARMLESS I WOULD HAVE KILLED IT MYSELF.

Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then, briefly. Under very specialized conditions, such as today.

How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just—change. With nothing causing it.

But if I wasn’t doing it someone else would be, and they might get it wrong.

Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.

A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person’s eyes maybe died back in childhood.

“I think, really, there is nothing more terrible than the sacrifice of someone or something, a living thing, without its ever knowing.

The tragedy in his life already existed. To love an atmospheric spirit. That was the real sorrow. Hopelessness itself.