STREET DOGS

His hands, his face — it clung to every part of him, except his eyes. Round with awe his shone, like those of a little boy; he looks, she thought, as if he has been playing and now it’s time to give up and come home.

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls. It managed to emerge from every object, as if it — the silence — meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes.

The silence visible and, in its own way, alive — bursting in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.

I understand how you suffer now when you’re depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then by means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don’t care. It doesn’t matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.

So although I heard the emptiness intellectually, I didn’t feel it. My first reaction consisted of being grateful that we could afford a Penfield mood organ.

But then I realised how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting — do you see?

I guess you don’t. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it “absence of appropriate affect”.

So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented.

And I finally found a setting for despair. So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that’s a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything. — from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick