Typed letter signed to Claudia Bush.

DICK, Philip K.

Edité par [California:] 15 February 1975

A propos de cet article

A typed letter signed from Dick to MA student Claudia Krenz Bush, with nine corrections in his hand. This is a dense letter in which Dick tackles theories of reality and time, referring to Plato, Parmenides, Aristotle, Robert E. Ornstein, Emanuel Kant, Nikolai Kozyrev, and Christ. Dick dives straight in with a discussion whether time is linear or cyclic. Cyclic time would mean that "when the new crop of corn or wheat appears, it is not a new crop, it is the same crop. we know that the ancient and primitive cultures believed this". The modern world has substituted this for linear time, which Dick thinks is a mistake. "We are like children watching a merry-go-round and imagining that every single horse is a totally new horse, rather than the same ones repeating themselves. If one takes a merry-go-round as paradigm for the universe, then what is our mental age as we see only lineal time? And not the eternal repetitions?". He allows that our lifespans are too short for us to see the cyclic nature of the merry-go-round: we are "jerked away" before we can see the repetitions. But this, he notes, is "precisely how the miracle of transubstantiation takes place: it joins us by piercing through our lineal time to the unchanging moment of the Last Supper". Using psychologist Robert E. Ornstein's research on the different hemispheres of the brain as a touchstone, Dick locates our "time-space sense" or capacity to "pierce to the heart of things" in the right hemisphere of the brain, as "the left alone certainly knows only lineal time". He points to Kant's metaphysics as a symptom of how "we have gone too far into 'inner space' as the realm where everything takes place" and argues strenuously that we have developed two brain hemispheres, each of which is a separate mind, in order to perceive both lineal and cyclic time. We have, Dick argues, evolved to see only lineal time because it is more useful for our quotidian experience of reality. However, he sees no reason to abandon one in favour of the other. "Why not hold both? Have your cake and eat it too? Where does it say you can't? Is the universe limited to just so many fundamental constituents and that's it?". This letter is published in The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick (1993). Three leaves (280 x 216 mm), typed one side only. Faint stains to edges, else well-preserved.

N° de réf. du vendeur 175031

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Typed letter signed to Claudia Bush.
• Éditeur: [California:] 15 February 1975
• Signé: Signé par l'auteur