Transcendence vs Wii

Philip K Dick sez:

But I think you show know this — specifically, in case you are, say, in your twenties and rather poor and perhaps becoming filled with despair, whether you are an SF writer or not, whatever you want to make of your life. There can be a lot of fear, and often it is justified fear. People do starve in America. I have seen uneducated street girls survive horrors that beggar description. I have seen the faces of men whose brains have been burned-out by drugs, men who could still think enough to be able to realize what had happened to them; I watched their clumsy attempt to weather that which cannot be weathered … Kabir, the sixteenth century Sufi poet, wrote, “If you have not lived through it, it is not true.” So live through it; I mean, go all the way to the end. Only then can it be understood, not along the way.

This is what he’s saying, I think: when you decide to shrug off the shackles of a conventional life, when you step off the cliff to become whatever you are meant to be, you will not fly. Nothing in your capitulation to destiny will give you wings. You will fall, and fall, and fall, and it will be terrifying, and all that’ll be waiting for you at the bottom is the impact. No fairy-tale ending here. If life is pain, then a fully-realized life is agony.

But on the other side of agony: transcendence.

Maybe.

So … transcendence is nice and all, but it’s not that nice. Here’s the deal, Destiny: call me when I can order transcendence on Amazon.com. In the meantime, I think I’ll settle for a Nintendo Wii.

Not that you can get Wii’s on Amazon, either.

Or anywhere else, for that matter.

Stupid Nintendo Wii’s.