This is the most ontologically terrifying book I've ever read.

Objects twist and reverse; bodies crumple into dust; apparitions manifest across past and present time.

And slowly, slowly, everyone dies, in various states of incomprehension and false knowledge.

There are, simply, no grounds on which anyone may stand.

There is only the exhausting slip of time.

Winding down, towards nothingness.

—

Perhaps, the greatest cruelty is to die knowing that no one, and nothing, willed your death. That there was no point to your suffering, for yourself, or for another. That you were nothing but a nexus through which an absurd world passed, churning, endlessly, all your toil, grief and fear, simply because it does and it must.

Dick reaches towards this. Every time an explanation is given as to what is happening, the landscape shifts. Who, or what, is the agency of entropy, cannot be pinned down. Neither can their motives. After all, entropy, like gravity, can only be traced through that which it touches. It cannot itself be touched.

Dick does, ultimately, unveil the agent of entropy (and a trickster joke at that), but his postmodern proclivities permit no heroic or transcendental event for his protagonist. There is no salvation in knowledge, only the enervated labour of the already damned, already too late to save.

—

I think I finally understand why I dislike surrealist novels so much; because despite their many associative transformations, there is no absurd break with the real — there is no possibility of a real — whereas with Dick, there is always its promise, deferred or split from oneself. That is far more emotionally resonant with me than the pure phantasm of surrealist play. Dick hurts, in a way nothing else does, because his phantasms are indeterminate from reality — anxious without end.