DICK, Philip K.

£4,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Typed letter signed, to Patricia Warrick. A lengthy letter to the science fiction writer Professor Patricia Warrick, in which Dick battles with the nature of reality and vents about his contretemps with Ursula K. Le Guin. Dick launches immediately into an exposition on the difficulty of knowing reality when one is "hopelessly entangled with reality", continuing from a previous letter sent to Warrick. He quotes from Schopenhauer and Spinoza and glosses their theories: "One's own mind in the act of perceiving reality will so-to-speak set up ripples in reality, which will result in a kind of infinite feedback, a great circle of regress in which neither oneself nor reality is understood objectively". While acknowledging the impossibility of achieving an objective perspective on reality, Dick nonetheless asserts that "this is precisely what happened with me in March 1974". In March 1974, Dick had a series of transcendent visionary experiences following a wisdom tooth operation and a home delivery of opioids. These experiences, including the sensation that his mind was invaded by a benign but separate consciousness, were a major creative and spiritual touchstone for Dick. In this letter, he describes how "the living reality of the universe spoke and defined itself... I was awakened, as if I had been sleeping."Dick did not shy away from sharing his revelations with the world, and in early 1981 (prior to this letter) he published VALIS, a novel based on his visions. It was met with m

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