Tao Te Ching
Man in the High Castle,
We all know that people tend to see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear; and, because of that, miss much of reality creating their own mini version of how things are instead. Like in the Kurosawa film, Rashomon where multiple characters see self-serving, subjective, and completely different versions of the same event; almost everyone shades and distorts reality for their own ends while—at the same time—influencing those around them to a belief in their own deception. This description may represent a common, everyday experience; but, how far can this dynamic extend? History’s list of charismatic tyrants, fanatical cult leaders, and advertising gurus give vivid and often tragic examples of hundreds, even millions of people being hypnotized or in other ways convinced into false perceptions vividly believed. But can that process go further? Can an entire society be brought into a belief system opposed to reality and yet perceived as real? Man in the High Castle explores that possibility as well as the consequences of doubt and disbelief when living in such a falsely created reality.
Themes
Quotes from Man in the High Castle,
“'Sir, you are offering a fake, an imitation of the authentic'… Akin to primal childhood awakening; facts of life… Synthetic image distilled from hearing assorted talk. Myth implanted subtly in tissue of the brain.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“These people are not exactly human. They don the dress but they’re like monkeys dolled up in the circus. They’re clever and can learn, but that is all.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are , ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“By refusing to face facts… they accelerate the tendency toward greater tour de force adventures, less predictability, less stability in general. The cycle of manic enthusiasm, then fear, then desperate solutions… all this tends to bring the most irresponsible and reckless politicians to the top.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“Even if all life on our planet is destroyed, there must be other life somewhere which we know nothing of. It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not perceive.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“eventually there will be no life… This is an interval. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“I feel the hot winds of karma driving me. Nevertheless I remain here. I must not shrink from the clear white light”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“I have a pathetic tendency to unerringly choose the easier of two evils. Like a cow catching sight of the trough; I gallop without premeditation… I go along with the exterior motions because it is safer”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“It reflected light. Fire. Not heavy and weary, but pulsing with life—the high realm aspect of yang: empyrean, ethereal. That is the artist’s job: taking mineral rock from dark silent earth and transforming it into a shining light reflecting from from sky.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“Life is short. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like a concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“Our defects are so tenuous, so delicate, that we’re hardly able to perceive them. In fact, we have to rise a notch in our evolution to know”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“that cold but somehow enthusiastic look, as if he believed in nothing and yet somehow had absolute faith. They’re not idealists; they’re cynics with utter faith. It’s a sort of brain defect, like a lobotomy—that maiming those German psychiatrists do as a poor substitute for psychotherapy.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“The dilemma of civilized man: body mobilized in preparation for panic flight but danger obscure; nothing to see; nothing for body to do. Run? But where to and why? No clue.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“The Tao is that which first lets the light, then the dark; occasions the interplay of the two primal forces so that there is always renewal.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“The universe will never be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths. That is the Way. When the seed falls, it falls into the earth, into the soil. And beneath, out of sight, it comes to life.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“There is evil. It’s actual like cement… It’s an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds, hearts, into the pavement itself.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“We can only control the end by making a choice at each step—obscure admixtures, blends with no proper tool by which to untangle the components—… and we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence, an unfolding process.”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
“What gods notice, they destroy. Be humble and you will escape the jealousy of the great”
Chapters:
Comments: Click to comment
Comments (0)