So It Were

The Roman Rule:
The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it.
— Arthur Bloch, Murphy’s Law, Book Three, p.18.

Thompson’s Theorem:
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
— Arthur Bloch, Ibid., p. 31.

Kierkegaard’s Observation:
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.
— Arthur Bloch, Ibid., p. 82.

     “There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.”
— Neils Bohr, in Principia Discordia: The Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse, p. 9.

     An Age of Confusion, or an Ancient Age, is one in which History As We Know It begins to unfold, in which Whatever Is Coming emerges in Corporeal Form, more or less, and such times are Ages of Balanced Unbalance, or Unbalanced Balance.
     An Age of Bureaucracy is an Imperial Age in which Things Mature, in which Confusion becomes entrenched and during which Balanced Balance, or Stagnation, is attained.
     An Age of Disorder or an Aftermath is an Apocalypse Period of Transition back to Chaos through the Screen of Oblivion into which the Age passeth, finally. These are Ages of Unbalanced Unbalance.
— HBT; The Book of Uterus, Chap. 3, in Ibid., p. 18.

“This book is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no apostle looks out.”
— Lichtenberg, in Ibid., p. 22.

     An excellent therapist I once knew made the point that in almost all cases of criminal psychotic acting-out there is an easier alternative that the disturbed person overlooked. Brenda Spenser, for instance, could have walked to the local supermarket and bought a carton of chocolate milk instead of shooting eleven people, most of them children. The psychotic person actually chooses the more difficult path; he forces his way uphill. It is not true that he takes the line of least resistance, but he thinks that he does. There, precisely, lies his error. The basis of psychosis, in a nutshell, is the chronic inability to see the easy way out. All the behavior, all that constitutes psychotic activity and the psychotic lifestyle, stems from this perceptual flaw.
     Sitting in isolation and silence in her antiseptic apartment, waiting for the inexorable knock on the door, the Lysol Lady had contrived to put herself in the most difficult circumstances possible. What was easy was made hard. What was hard was transmuted, finally, into the impossible, and there the psychotic lifestyle ends, when the impossible closes in and there are no options at all, even difficult ones. That is the rest of the definition of psychosis: At the end there lies a dead end. And, at that point, the psychotic person freezes. If you have ever seen it happen — well, it is an amazing sight. The person congeals like a motor that has seized. It occurs suddenly. One moment the person is in motion — the pistons are going up and down frantically — and then it’s an inert block. That is because the path has run out for that person, the path he probably got on to years before. It is kinetic death. “Place there is none,” St. Augustine wrote. “We go backward and forward, and there is no place.” And then the cessation comes and there is only place….
— Philip K. Dick, in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, Lawrence Sutin (ed.), p. 41.

     It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories that asked the question “What is reality?,” to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.
— Philip K. Dick, in Ibid., p. 261.