Books and reality are fused (Philip K. Dick)

…I can say with all truthfulness that for me the moment of greatest understanding in which I knew spiritual reality at last came in connection with emergency root-canal irrigation, two hours in the dentist chair. And twelve hours drinking bourbon-bad bourbon at that-and simply reading Dante without listening to the stereo or eating-there was no way I could eat-and suffering, and it was all worth it; I will never forget it. I am no different, then, from Timothy Archer. To me, too, books are real and alive; the voices of human beings issue forth from them and compel my assent, the way God compels our assent to world, as Tim said. When you have been in that much distress, you are not going to forget what you did and saw and thought and read that night; I did nothing, saw nothing, thought nothing; I read and I remember; I did not read Howard the Duck or The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers or Snatch Comix that night; I read Dante’s Commedia, from Inferno through Purgatorio, until at last I arrived in the three colored rings of light … and the time was nine A.M. and I could get into my fucking car and shoot out into traffic and Dr. Davidson’s office, crying and cursing the whole way, with no breakfast, not even coffee, and stinking of sweat and bourbon, a sorry mess indeed, much gaped at by the dentist’s receptionist.

So for me in a certain unusual way-for certain unusual reasons-books and reality are fused; they join through one incident, one night of my life: my intellectual life and my practical life came together-nothing is more real than a badly infected tooth-and having done so they never completely came apart again. If I believed in God, I would say that he showed me something that night; he showed me the totality: pain, physical pain, drop by drop, and then, this being his dreadful grace, there came understanding … and what did I understand? That it is all real; the abscessed tooth and the root-canal irrigation, and, no less and no more…

From Philip K. Dick’s 1982 novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.