“W ithout knowing it during the years I wrote, my thinking and writing was a long journey toward enlightenment. I first saw the illusory nature

Do androids dream of Berkeley? The city of Phillip K. Dick's youth

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2021-05-30 14:30:03

“W ithout knowing it during the years I wrote, my thinking and writing was a long journey toward enlightenment. I first saw the illusory nature of space when I was in high school. In the late forties I saw that causality was an illusion.”

This is a reflective Philip K. Dick, writing in the last few years of his life, trying to put into words a social and metaphysical philosophy that had been haunting him for decades as he wrote dozens of science fiction stories that aimed to, as he said, “pierce the veil of what is only apparently real to find out what is really real.” The world was not real, everything was an illusion and everyday life was but a living dream.

It’s fitting that Berkeley — a city of artists and intellectuals and mechanics and squatters — was the place where the epiphany revealed itself to him; that Berkeley would become the locale of inspirational fodder for decades to come.

His family moved to the city in 1931 when he was just 2. School records at the nursery he attended described Dick as “a lover of peace,” with an “intellectual curiosity and keen interest in everything about him.”