{"text":"Disappointment with elites is the theme that shines most brightly in my reading of PKD. Here’s another reason I enjoy him, which I’ve never seen discussed: He’s an excellent writer on interiority, on this front the equal to Proust. (One interesting strand in his work is an abiding interest in German culture, history, and philosophy—thus surely he’s familiar with the idea of *bildung*, or personal cultivation.) PKD came of age in the postwar boom years of California, a setting in which people held earnest beliefs in utopia, inflected at the same time by paranoid fears driven by the Cold War. His books tend to feature a more-or-less ordinary person who is dropped into a perplexing dream. PKD places us in the shoes of a person who finds the world very odd. He’s telling us that the world is in fact deeply weird, and that it’s difficult to really understand other people. And that makes him a very good friend for the nerd.","title":"2019 Letter","author":"Dan Wang","highlighted_at":"2023-03-14T05:11:10.796138Z","url":"https://read.readwise.io/read/01gvcjjdfqx4hhrmdm1k46e07z"}