Jesuit missionaries returning from Beijing at the end of the seventeenth century had introduced the I Ching to West. Believed to be China’s oldest book and to hold the key to all wisdom, it reduces the entire universe to the interplay of two complementary principles, yin and yang—sometimes interpreted as shadow and light, female and male, rest and movement, earth and sky, cold and hot, and so forth. The simple technique of throwing three coins six times produces a figure, a hexagram, whose structure reveals precisely how much of each principle resides in the world at a given moment, and one can adjust one’s actions accordingly. In the sixty-four possible figures, life can be found in all its infinite diversity, its eternal ebb and flow modified at every second. That is why the I Ching is called the Book of Changes. It describes not fixed states but rather the tendencies within them that impel their transformation. It explains that every moment is fleeting, that every zenith heralds a decline and every defeat a future victory. To those who wander in the shadows, the I Ching teaches that the light will return; to those who vaunt their triumph in the noonday sun, it advises that twilight is already on its way; to the wise man, it teaches the subtle art of letting oneself be carried along by the flux of things, the way a rudderless boat is borne along by the river.
Various translations of the I Ching’s sibylline texts, usually with commentaries on each of the hexagrams, had been proposed in the two centuries following its discovery by the Europeans. Interest in the book, however, was limited to a small group of scholars until 1924, when Richard Wilhelm, a German cleric who had fallen in love with China, offered a rendering whose exceptional quality dramatically increased the I Ching’s audience. Jung numbered among Wilhelm’s admirers, and one of Jung’s students, Cary F. Baynes, published an American version in 1951. The book was an underground classic in the 1950s, and in the next two decades came to enjoy genuine popularity. The composer John Cage used it to plot out his chord progressions, physicists turned to it to explain the behavior of subatomic particles; during the beatnik days, hipsters would smoke a few joints, throw the coins onto their kilims, and then make what they could of sentences like “Perseverance is advantageous,” or “Caring for the cow will bring luck,” or “Free yourself of your big toe. Then a companion will come up to you and you can bond yourself to him.”
Phil’s own discovery of the I Ching in 1960 put him, so to speak, at the tail end of the avant-garde. He had first read about it in an article by Jung and immediately obtained a copy, and from that moment on the book never left his side. He initiated Anne, and soon the whole household was living by the ambiguous laws of the oracle, consulting it on questions of every sort and entrusting to it even the most prosaic decisions.
There are two ways of using the I Ching, as either a book of wisdom or a technique of divination. One can look to it for general guidance about how to live or for specific answers to specific questions, such as “Will I have enough gas to make it to the next gas station?” The first approach seems somehow more respectable, more reasonable; certainly it leaves one open to fewer disappointments than does the second. Unfortunately for Phil Dick, if there was one thing he was not seeking, it was wisdom. Everything that Taoism (for which the I Ching was the frame of reference) had to teach about the benefits of flexibility, patience, and detachment, or, more broadly speaking, any approach to life based on reflective experience and asceticism was of no interest to him. In this respect Phil was deeply esoterist: convinced that beneath the visible there lay a Hidden Secret, he could not imagine that life would offer up its secrets to him gradually and progressively. It was up to the intellect, he thought, to lay hold of the Secret and take it by force, and what he asked of culture, psychoanalysis, and even religion was not that they educate him but that they hand over the password that would permit him to escape from the cave wherein we are shown not the real world but only its shadows.
When he had first begun to write, Phil had a particular fondness for a story by a fellow SF writer, Fredric Brown. In this tale, scientists from around the world join forces to build an enormous computer into which they have input all the data constituting human wisdom, along with a program capable of synthesizing the information. At last comes the solemn moment when they turn on the machine. Trembling slightly, someone taps out the first question on the keyboard. “Is there a God?” The reply is immediate. “Yes, now there is…”
In a way, the I Ching is like that computer, and its set of sixty-four hexagrams like the computer program: they make it possible to comprehend—in all senses of the word—the universe. With his customary pedantry, Phil explained to Anne how in this combinatorial system of solid and broken lines Leibniz had recognized the precursor of his own system, based solely on the two digits 0 and 1, which itself prefigured the on-off binary operations of digital technology. To someone who was always coming up with ultimate questions or always looking for the opportunity to ask them, the I Ching must have seemed like nothing less than a gift from the gods.
The I Ching had advised Phil to rent the shack in which he would either write a truly worthwhile novel or else die trying. (Naturally, it was Phil himself who framed the choice in such dramatic terms. The I Ching would never have put it that way; in the event of failure, it would have simply suggested that the time had not been propitious or that the task had been undertaken with inadvisable rashness.) When he moved his things into the shack, he set the two black volumes of the Wilhelm/Baynes edition on the table next to his typewriter, along with the three Chinese coins that he used to construct the hexagrams. Then he sat and waited. The recommended practice was to rid one’s mind of all thoughts before consulting the oracle, but try as he might, Phil couldn’t manage. Images and familiar ideas floated to the surface of his consciousness. He figured that some of this mental flotsam would find its way into the book, but in any case it was important not to force or rush things. You simply let everything drift along, carried by the current.
One image, in the center of it all, was of a piece of jewelry—a pin or perhaps a pendant—something dense and compact that you could hold in the palm of your hand. It was not precious, but when you examined it closely, tossed it in your hand to feel its heft, something began to change inside you. The din of consciousness began to subside, old antagonisms either disappeared or else struck such perfect balance that you now experienced them as one. Calm, clarity. The piece of jewelry would have to go into his book. The book would need to resemble the piece of jewelry.
But how could it, given that it was probably going to be about Nazism, a topic he had been thinking about for the last few months? He had read numerous books on the subject, most recently Hannah Arendt’s account of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, and knew that when it came time for him to write his first really serious work, it would in some way or other be about this. Anyone who lived in the second half of the twentieth century had to contend with, to live with, to cope with Nazism, with the idea that it had happened—just as he had had to live with the death of his twin sister. Just because you don’t think about it doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. That would also have to go into the book.
Nothing could be further from the Tao than Nazism. Yet the Japanese, who venerated the Tao, were the Nazis’ allies during the war. What if the Axis powers had won? Books of this sort had already been written, of course; Phil had read one himself in which the South defeats the North in the Civil War. He turned the question around and around in his head. What would the world be like if, fifteen years earlier, the Axis powers had won the war? Who would be leading the Third Reich? Hitler, or one of his lieutenants? Would it have changed anything had it been Bormann, or Himmler, or Goring, or Baldur von Schirach? Would it have changed anything for him, Philip K. Dick, resident of Point Reyes, Marin County, California? What would be different?
It felt odd to be imagining not a hypothetical future but a hypothetical past. The more he thought about it, the more this past and the present that ensued from it seemed to take on substance: things actually could have happened this way. In fact, this past and this present he was now thinking about actually did exist some way; they were using his brain to exist. But they could have existed in a million different forms—it all depended on the choices he made. At every moment, millions of events were either going to happen or not going to happen; at each instant, variables transformed themselves into givens, the virtual became the actual. That was why at any given moment the world reveals a different state of reality. On a small scale, this is how all writers operate: since anything can happen, it is up to them to decide that this happens rather than that.
Phil sensed that it was time to seek the counsel of the I Ching. He threw the coins and got Hexagram 60: Chieh—“Limitation.”
Water over lake: the image of limitation.
Thus the superior man
Creates number and measure
And examines the nature of virtue and correct conduct.
Commentary: “A lake is something limited. Water is inexhaustible. A lake can contain only a definite amount of the infinite quantity of water; this is its peculiarity. In human life too the individual achieves significance through discrimination and the setting of limits.”
Amazing, he thought, how the oracle nearly always got it right. Detractors would have said that the advice the I Ching offers—patience, moderation, perseverance, and so forth—is merely common sense phrased in terms general enough to be appropriate for all circumstances. To a certain degree, Phil agreed. He didn’t need it to help him come up with the exact structure for his novel, he maintained, but it did lead him to see better the organization he was already struggling to build by helping him understand the importance of structure. For example, the first thing the novelist must do is adumbrate the novel’s limits.
* * *
Phil decided that after their final crushing victory over the Allies in 1947, the Axis powers divided up the world between them. The Third Reich has Europe, Africa, and that portion of America east of the Rocky Mountains, while Japan rules Asia, the Pacific, and America’s western states. Chancellor Martin Bormann continues his predecessor’s policies, turning an appreciable percentage of the Reich’s subject populations into bars of soap and the African continent into … well, no one knows for sure, and no one really wants to know. The populations ruled by Japan, on the other hand, bear a more humane yoke of oppression—no concentration camps, no police terror. Americans living under the Japanese regime have come to internalize the social code of their occupiers: they fear losing face and breaking protocol above all things, and they make no decision without first consulting the I Ching. At any given moment, thousands of ordinary Californians throw the coins and watch in fascination as the hexagram—this product of pure chance whose roots are nevertheless sunk deep into the texture of the world—takes shape. Each variation created by the solid and broken lines provides a key, at once singular and universal, with which the individual can understand the present. If the individual has his place in the order of things, it is in relation to that of every other living creature, past or present, and to the entire cosmos.
To illustrate this cosmic interdependence, Phil chose to multiply the number of protagonists and points of view. In the beginning, he had only names—Frank and Juliana Frink, Nobusuke Tagomi, Robert Childan, and the young Kasoura couple, Paul and Betty—but all he had to do was write down those names and throw the I Ching, and the specters came to life. Without their necessarily knowing one another, connections sprang up between them. Tagomi, a highly placed official of the Japanese government in California, wants to buy a gift for a visitor from the Third Reich. He pays a visit to Childan, who runs an antique shop specializing in prewar Americana: comic books, Mickey Mouse watches, Glenn Miller records, Civil War–era Colt .45s, all sorts of objects coveted by the occupying forces. Childan vouches for their authenticity—mistakenly, it seems, for most of them are actually fakes produced in a secret workshop where Frank Frink has worked until recently. But now he has been fired from his job there, and is trying his hand at making jewelry. Juliana, his wife, lives in Colorado, where she works as a judo instructor, having left Frank sometime before the story opens. At this point Phil still didn’t know what he was going to do with this character, but he wasn’t concerned. Somehow Juliana would make her way from the margins of the story to its very heart. He was sure she would turn out to be the perfect heroine; for the moment, all he had to do was let her live her life—go for walks, take showers, eat burgers at the diner. “Waiting in the meadow,” instructed Hexagram 5. “It furthers one to abide in what endures. No blame.” Phil made no bones about the fact that he had invented Juliana so that he could fall in love with her.
* * *
He worked feverishly, sometimes nine or ten hours at a stretch. He was beginning to feel that the novel already existed somewhere and that all he was really doing was following the directives of the oracle to bring it to light. When one of the characters came up with a hexagram that suggested a choice at odds with the admittedly vague plans the author had formulated for him or her, Phil fought the temptation to start all over and wait for a more propitious outcome. He let it go and went with the flow, trusting the story would develop on its own. At the end of his workday he was having more and more trouble pulling himself away from his writing. Pensively he would make his way slowly along the path that led through the pastures back to the big white house. He could hear voices from within, music too, and the clinking of plates and silverware. He lingered outside the door, scraping mud off his combat boots. It was always with a sense of disbelief that he found himself coming home to this woman to whom he had promised to dedicate his first serious novel and who had no place in it yet, as though the book admitted only real people into its world and thus excluded her. Juliana was dark and had jet-black hair; how could he have married a blond, and someone so shrill? She was always cursing and swearing, like the Russian pilgrim who mutters the name of Jesus over and over until it becomes part of his very breathing. Except with her it was “shit” and “fuck”—he felt as if toads were jumping out of her mouth. He tried not to rock the boat: he helped set the table; he played with the girls and with the baby. Then he would go into the bathroom to take the pills that enabled him keep his mental balance. Sometimes, late in the evening, when he knew he would be alone, he went into the jewelry workshop and sat down at the workbench. His fingers lingered on the brushes, tongs, metal shears, polishing wheels, and all those tiny precision tools he wished he knew how to use. That he didn’t know didn’t sadden him, however, for that part of his life had found its place in the world of the book he was now writing. Frank Frink worked in a place like this, except what he produced weren’t the innocent baubles like those Phil was now looking at. For without anyone’s conscious intervention, the objects that emerged from Frank’s kiln, objects without historical or even aesthetic value, took on a spiritual value: they were in balance, in harmony with the Tao. They offered a portal to the real world, the world that lay beneath the surface of things, and one needed only contemplate them to gain access to that world. There were no objects like these in Anne’s workshop, but in his novel there were, and it was even possible that the book itself would become such an object: a creation that might prove undistinguished from a literary standpoint but that, mysteriously, would give access to the truth. More and more, it seemed to Phil, something was wrong with his world, with Anne’s world. The book would be like a small tear in the surface of the painting through which those who knew how could pass to the other side. Few would know how. Certainly not Anne.
* * *
By one of those natural but circuitous routes that the book seems to favor, one of Frink’s jewelry creations finds its way into the hands of Tagomi. He is a man with much on his mind. To save one life, he has had to take two others, a decision that a Buddhist would have a hard time defending. Sitting on a bench in a public park in San Francisco, a thin outline of a man in a dark suit, Tagomi distractedly takes the piece of jewelry, a silver triangle, out of his pocket and begins to rub it, then examines it. The silver catches the sun’s rays.
Tagomi leaves the park, lost in thought. He tries to hail a bicycle taxi—a “pedicab”—and is surprised to find none around. On reaching the waterfront, he is amazed by the spectacle before him: a gigantic swath of concrete stretches as far as the eye can see along the edge of the bay. It looks like a midway ride on a monstrous scale, swarming with strange-looking vehicles. At first Tagomi thinks he must be dreaming. He has passed here on any number of occasions and never seen this futuristic-looking structure that must have taken months, perhaps years, to build. He shuts his eyes and opens them again, but the apparition remains. In a panic, he stops a passerby and asks him to explain what this monstrosity before them is. The man’s reply, that Tagomi is looking at the Embarcadero Freeway, fills him with confusion and dismay. He goes into a coffee shop to seek solace, but the lunch counter is full and none of the people there—all Caucasians—will give up their seats for him, even though as a Japanese, a member of the ruling race, he should be shown more deference. He feels as if the earth is giving way under his feet. What nightmare has he fallen into? The silver triangle has disoriented him, yanked him from his universe, his space, his time. He stumbles through a twilight zone where there are no familiar landmarks to guide him, and he cannot decide whether what he is experiencing is objective reality or the sign of some internal breakdown—perhaps he has an inner-ear infection, or else he’s sleepwalking or hallucinating.
Then the bicycle taxis reappear, with Caucasians pedaling Japanese fares to their destinations. The world looks familiar again. Tagomi’s absence could have lasted no more than ten minutes. But until his dying day he will wonder where he spent those ten minutes. Never again will he dare to look at this strange piece of silver jewelry that opened the door to a strange world. Nor will he ever again flip through that scandalous science fiction novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which seems to be on everyone’s mind. Written by Hawthorne Abendsen, a reputed recluse, the book has been banned in the Reich-controlled lands but circulates openly in the Japanese zone; it is a source of endless controversy, for it describes an imaginary world in which the Allies won the war.
Dick puts Abendsen’s novel in the hands of each of his characters and observes their reactions. Some of them find it fairly pointless, more so even than stories that try to predict the future; for whereas the future is anyone’s guess, the past is a foregone conclusion, so why go to all the trouble trying to imagine it differently? Others find the novel troubling yet instructive. “Interesting book.… Odd nobody thought of writing it before.… It should help to bring home to us how lucky we are. In spite of the obvious disadvantages,… we could be so much worse off. Great moral lesson pointed out by that book. Yes, there are Japs in power here, and we are a defeated nation. But we have to look ahead; we have to build.”
The most vivid reaction is Juliana’s. In creating this seductive, slightly neurotic brunette, Dick was not only giving vent to an erotic fantasy but also suggesting the outlines of the ideal reader; for him it was the same thing. And Juliana doesn’t let him down. She doesn’t think Abendsen’s novel is strange or weird or provocative; she thinks it’s true. “Am I the only one who knows? I’ll bet I am; nobody else really understands Grasshopper but me—they just imagine they do.”
* * *
When he decided to complicate his novel by inserting Abendsen, Phil still did not know if his characters should actually set eyes on this writer who, in the world of the novel, has written its complement. He thought it might be better if they didn’t know whether he existed or not. The idea of portraying Abendsen was both appealing and terrifying at the same time. It was a lot like looking at oneself in the mirror.
There are those who sense that every mirror conceals a depth within it, that on the other side of the mirror’s flat, smooth surface lies a world as fully formed and as real as their own—maybe even more so. And for someone who believes that the hallway that starts on this side of the mirror continues on the other side, it’s not an enormous leap to the conclusion that the real world lies not on this side of the mirror but on the other. This side—the side we live on—is the reflection. Phil had known this since he was a small boy, and he also knew something else, something that no one else knew: he knew who lived on the other side of the mirror—it was Jane. In the world on this side of the mirror, the one people called the real world, Jane had died and he had lived. But on the other side of the mirror, things were reversed. He was dead and Jane had survived and was now peering anxiously into the mirror world inhabited by her poor twin brother. Perhaps Jane’s world was the real one; perhaps he was the one living in the reflection, in a world that had been re-created for him to obscure the terrifying fact that he was surrounded by the dead. Phil believed that one day he would have to write a book about that: the story of someone who discovers that all of us are actually dead.
The oracle had guided him into describing the hidden world on the other side of the mirror, and he had obeyed. He had described the novel that Hawthorne Abendsen, in that mirror world, had written in his place. He had described this dark-haired girl—the mirror opposite of Anne, she was just as he had imagined Jane would be—and this girl had understood, just as Jane would have understood, as Anne would never understand, that Abendsen’s novel wasn’t about some imaginary world; it was about the real world. So now Juliana wanted to meet Abendsen. It seemed to Phil that, in Abendsen’s place, he would have been both terribly drawn to the idea of meeting her and terribly afraid at the same time; it would be like meeting Jane, or death itself. But the decision wasn’t up to him.
* * *
The end of the novel was approaching. Phil knew this as surely as any reader who flips through the thinning number of unread pages left to read. He has Juliana, now in her old Studebaker driving through the Rocky Mountains, pull over to the side of the deserted road. Her black hair is wet. Her breasts swing freely beneath her dress, a gift from a Nazi whose throat she slashed with a razor blade just a few hours ago. Out of her purse she takes the two worn black volumes of the Wilhelm/Baynes edition and right there and then, with the car engine running, throws the three coins. “What’ll I do? She asked it. Tell me what to do; please.”
She gets Hexagram 42—“Increase”—with moving lines that transform into 43, “Breakthrough.”
One must resolutely make the matter known
At the court of the king.
It must be answered truthfully. Danger.
One can imagine Phil biting his lips, hoping for one of those usefully equivocal replies the I Ching sometimes makes, the kind you can interpret as you see fit. The reply Juliana gets is frightening clear. She will have to go to “report to the prince.” She puts the car into gear and drives on.
Up until this point, Abendsen has been described by one character after another as living in an isolated mountain fortress—hence his sobriquet, the Man in the High Castle—but Phil was no longer interested in pursuing this aspect of the story; what’s more, he knew it wasn’t true. Juliana’s quest ends in a suburb of Cheyenne, Colorado, in front of a single-story stucco house with a nice lawn and a child’s tricycle parked in the long cement driveway. The house is lit up; you can hear music and the sound of voices. Someone is having a party.
She makes her way up the flagstone path to the front steps and walks in the door. Just a few more pages, Phil must have thought, and a little bit of dialogue and it’ll all be over. I’ll know what story this damn novel is supposed to be telling.
Danger.
She is greeted by Abendsen’s wife, who points out the master of the house to her, then guides her over to him to make the introductions. So this is what the author looks like, Juliana is thinking: a tall, solid-looking guy with dark curly hair, holding an old-fashioned. They start to chat. He asks if she wants a drink, and she takes him up on the offer. What can I get you? Oh, an I. W. Harper over ice would be fine.
She tells Abendsen why she’s come, then asks why he wrote his novel. He resists her questions, but Juliana presses on. “The oracle wrote your book. Didn’t it?” she asks, and finally Mrs. Abendsen answers for him, telling Juliana that he used the oracle for every decision involved in the book—the setting, the characters, the plot, all those thousands of choices that go into making up a story; that he even consulted it to find out how the book would be received and was told it would be a huge success. The first great success of his career.
Knock on wood, Phil must have thought, tapping his knuckles on the tabletop.
But Juliana shakes her head impatiently. She has not come all this way to find out that Abendsen and the oracle collaborated on the novel; she’s known that for a long time. What she wants to know is—why. Why did the oracle choose to write a novel through the intermediary of Abendsen? And why this novel? Why this subject rather than some other?
Abendsen has no answer to that question. Nor, for that matter, did Phil. Perhaps the oracle could tell them. The two black volumes are brought out again, along with three Chinese coins, a piece of paper, and a pencil to draw the hexagram. Juliana asks the question: “Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?”
Phil held his breath, then threw the three coins six times. He drew the hexagram.
“Sun at the top. Tui at the bottom. Empty in the center.
61: Chung Fu—‘Inner Truth.’
“The wind blows over the lake and stirs the surface of the water. Thus visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves.” A moment of silence follows. Finally, Juliana speaks. “And I know what it means,” she says.
Raising his head, Hawthorne scrutinized her. He had now an almost savage expression. “It means, does it, that my book is true?”
“Yes,” she said.
With anger he said, “Germany and Japan lost the war.”
“Yes.”
Hawthorne, then, closed the two volumes and rose to his feet; he said nothing.
“Even you don’t face it,” Juliana said.
Then she leaves.
Confused, Phil followed her. Was that it? Was the novel finished? No publisher would take it on. They would want him to explain the ending, to at least add another chapter to justify it. Even he, the author, felt disconcerted by the way the book now ended. In Time Out of Joint, he didn’t just say that Ragle Gumm had been right all along and leave it at that; he explained why and went to a hell of a lot of trouble coming up with that whole business about the antimissile defense requiring the fabrication of a retro world around the hero. It was part of his responsibility toward his public. Now it dawned on him that he hadn’t worried about any of this while writing The Man in the High Castle. He had been going along like the detective novelist who waits until the last chapter before figuring out who the murderer is going to be and dealing with questions of means and motives. He had been counting on the I Ching to show him the way out. And now the I Ching had left him with nothing but this ambiguous nonending, this lousy Zen koan.
The letdown was all the more exasperating because had he caught himself in time, had he laid the necessary groundwork, a revelation like this one would have fit in almost perfectly in a novel that was at least in part about Nazism. He had understood from Hannah Arendt that the goal of a totalitarian state is to cut people off from reality, to give them a make-believe world to live in instead. If the notion of a parallel universe is a chimera, then totalitarian states give substance to it. They exercise what Saint Thomas Aquinas denied was possible, and what Saint Peter Damian believed was the province only of the Almighty Himself: the ability to alter the past. This privilege—to make what happened not have happened—the Nazis and the Bolsheviks arrogated to themselves by rewriting history, foisting on it their own apocryphal versions. Trotsky had never led the Red Army; Beria disappeared from the Soviet encyclopedia, replaced by an alphabetically contiguous entry less compromising to those in power—the Bering Straits. And as for the victims of the German concentration camps, the object had been not simply to kill them but to make it seem as if they had never existed in the first place. In one extraordinary passage in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt describes how the czarist secret police reportedly mapped out the acquaintances of every person deemed unfit to live: around the name of each person a circle was drawn; around those of his political friends, his nonpolitical friends, and people in contact with those friends more circles were drawn; then, between those circles, lines were drawn to show all the cross-relationships. Had the sheet of paper been large enough, all of humanity would have found its place on the chart.
Phil had once read about social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s “small-world study,” which had concluded that everyone living on the earth was separated by five or six handshakes. The idea delighted him. What that means, he told Anne, is that you have shaken the hand of someone who has shaken the hand of someone else who has shaken the hand of someone else who has shaken the hand of someone else who has shaken the hand of, let’s say, Richard Nixon or such and such a resident of Benares. This principle of universal contamination, the nightmare and engine of the totalitarian utopia, logically entails the deportation of everyone, including those doing the deporting. Nonetheless, given that even a totalitarian state is not exempt from the reality principle, it had to find another solution, which was to erase the disappeared not just from the documents but from the memory of those who were, for the time being at least, spared. And one of the most horrific discoveries totalitarian states revealed to humanity is that such a thing can be done. If the Third Reich had still ruled Europe, thought Phil, not only was it likely that it would have had to exterminate dozens of millions more people; it was also likely that the survivors, their throats made raw by the smoke bellowing day after day from the crematoria smokestacks, wouldn’t have even known. If the price of survival is ignorance, you simply choose not to know.
Phil had also read in a popular psychology magazine about Solomon Asch’s famous experiment on social conformity. A group of people, all but one of them confederates of the experimenter, were shown three lines of varying lengths and asked which of the lines was the same length as a fourth they were shown. The confederates, as instructed beforehand, all replied incorrectly although the correct answer was obvious. With astonishing frequency, the one real subject, who went next to last, ended up disregarding what his own senses told him was true and joined in with the others. Totalitarian states were nothing if not an experiment of this kind on a vast scale. They had found out how to show a chair to people and get them to say it was a table. More than that, they got people to believe it as well. Looked at from this point of view, what Phil, under the prodding of the oracle, had described in his novel was not all that absurd. He had even touched on a profound truth.
The hypothesis was obviously even more plausible, he thought, if you flipped it around. There is really no reason for a democracy, even one as compromised as America’s had been by a Communist witch-hunt, to lead its citizens to believe that they are living under a totalitarian regime. But one could easily imagine that had Germany and Japan won the war, they might have tried to convince Americans that the opposite was true, in order to control them more completely. The poor deluded Americans could then have gone on living their little lives in their quiet suburbs, taking as much pride as they ever did in their God-given constitutional rights, never realizing that they were subjects of the Third Reich, with no rights at all. Year after year, millions of their fellow citizens would disappear without a trace, and no one would notice or ask questions—so strong is man’s instinct not to know. But in this case it would be up to Phil Dick, inhabitant of a supposedly free America, and not Hawthorne Abendsen, his specular double, to formulate these suspicions and weave them into a novel.
That, of course, was exactly what he had done.
Whoa. Wait a second.
Phil shook his head, trying to find his way out from under this absurd line of reasoning. He read through the commentary of the hexagram he had just drawn, hoping it might show him how to end the novel.
“This indicates a heart free of prejudice and therefore open to the truth.”
Phil chuckled. Imagining trying to tell that to an outraged publisher. He threw the coins again.
Meng—“Youthful Folly.”
It is not I who seek the young fool;
the young fool seeks me.
At the first oracle, I inform him.
If he asks two or three times, it is importunity.
If he importunes, I give him no information.
Perseverance furthers.
Okay, okay, he thought, irritated. I get it.
So Juliana had said everything there was to be said. He typed “The End” and walked back to the house, thinking he himself would have been curious to read the last pages of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. He would have liked to find out whether the novel was about him and what kind of ending the other guy had managed to come up with.