ORP: PKD again: LOA releases 3rd vol. in PKD series

I just finished reading the first of four novels in volume three of Library of America's edition of the definitive Philip K. Dick novels. This story was entitled "Maze of Death". The novel (really a novella by some standards) is a nice yarn about the dwindling crew of a colonizing starship marooned in a dead star system. With his insight into human psyche, PKD shows through the device of a virtual reality machine used on this starship originally for recreation and now used by the crew to escape from the reality of coming doom, how lost humanity turns in on themselves. We get this psychological exploration in many (if not all) of PKD's stories, but it is in sharp focus here in the final four novels by this writer. In this novel and the coming three of this volume we also get some interesting explorations of philosophy and religion. From what I have read so far of this author's novels, especially at the end of his works, I mourn the writer. To quote Maxwell Smart without the irony, he "missed it by that much," that is eternity. Man, I want to explore the multiverse, but I sure don't want to have lost heaven!

Though PKD lived completely within the drug culture of the 1960s and 1970s, he was quick to point out the lies told about where excessive use and abuse could lead you. This the overt message of his novel, "A Scanner Darkly".
But his analysis of madness is the best. Check out this passage from "V.A.L.I.S." (the second of the four novels in the LoA volume):

(p.190)...a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that--as if that weren't enough--but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.

Social Philosophy: Arbitrary Fortune & God's Sovereignty

I recently read an excellent post by Mark Horne on his blog about the nature of good and bad Providences and our response to the arbitrary position in life we each find ourselves in. The article (appropriately entitled "Notes from the Underground") was provoking enough that as I thought about it (not having time to make a comment right away), I decided to just make a blog entry. There are a lot of directions one can go with the thoughts in this article, and I want to make just a few observations, so read the article from the link above to understand why I make the few comments that I am making.

In thinking about having good fortune or not (comfort or suffering), and without regard to the underlying spiritual reality of our universe, I immediately thought of the lyrics to the Tracy Chapman song, "Mountains O' Things" which I quote here:

The life I've always wanted
I guess I'll never have
I'll be working for somebody else
Until I'm in my grave
I'll be dreaming of a live of ease
And mountains
Oh mountains o things

To have a big expensive car
Drag my furs on the ground
And have a maid that I can tell
To bring me anything
Everyone will look at me with envy and with greed
I'll revel in their attention
And mountains
Oh mountains o things

Sweet lazy life
Champagne and caviar
I hope you'll come and find me
'Cause you know who we are
Those who deserve the best in life
And know what money's worth
And those whose sole misfortune
Was having mountains o nothing at birth

Oh they tell me
There's still time to save my soul
They tell me
Renounce all
Renounce all those material things you gained by
Exploiting other human beings

Consume more than you need
This is the dream
Make you pauper
Or make you queen
I wont die lonely
I'll have it all prearranged
A grave that's deep and wide enough
For me and all my mountains o things

Mostly I feel lonely
Good good people are
Good people are only
My stepping stones
It's gonna take all my mountains o things
To surround me
Keep all my enemies away
Keep my sadness and loneliness at bay

I'll be dreaming, dreaming...
Dreaming...

You can see that this song reflects the psychological response of the people in our materialistic society.

I have felt myself, albeit on a much smaller level, the range of mental outlook that Mark mentions in his article. I have been at the bottom and have gradually moved up the socio-economic ladder, but I have had setbacks like my 40 month sojourn in the financial wilderness where I nearly lost my house. But it is true that it can all go away in an instant.

The other comment I wanted to make was that in the Church, I think that one of the (asymptotically close to) infinite purposes of God in the arbitrary elevation of some and denigration of others within the same body or within the same world, is that God wants to force us sinful humans to have to take care of each other. As we are drawn together, God's purposes are served in making us love one another. But since we are depraved beyond belief, we go through the mental gyrations that Mark describes. How many of you have seen a peer (or coworker, fellow student, etc.) once lifted up in life, completely forget where he/she just came from? How often I have seen the exploited, once lifted up only to join the exploiters themselves. We humans are so sick. {Shakes head.}