The Man in the High Castle

by Philip K. Dick

It will end, Childan thought. Someday. The very idea of place. Not governed and governing, but people.

‘What profit it a man if he gain the whole world but in this enterprise lose his soul?’”

Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up.

They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God’s power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate—confusion between him who worships and that which is worshiped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.

Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small . . . and you will escape the jealousy of the great.

According to our reference room, sir,” she said in a giggling voice, “the carrier Syokaku is at the bottom of the Philippine Sea. It was sunk by an American submarine in 1945. Any more questions we can help you with, sir?” Obviously they, at the newspaper office, appreciated the wild-goose variety of prank that had been played on him.

From the wall he took the Smithsonian Institution’s framed certificate; the paper and the lighter had cost him a fortune, but they were worth it—because they enabled him to prove that he was right, that the word “fake” meant nothing really, since the word “authentic” meant nothing really.

There’s nothing more foolish than economic competition.”

Mr. Tagomi said, “This situation has occurred before. We have not in our society solved the problem of the aged, more of which persons occur constantly as medical measures improve. China teaches us rightly to honor the old. However, the Germans cause our neglect to seem close to outright virtue. I understand they murder the old.”

The universe will never be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, to be truly transcendent, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths. That is the Way. When the seed falls, it falls into the earth, into the soil. And beneath, out of sight, it comes to life.

But we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence. An unfolding process. We can only control the end by making a choice at each step.

We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.