My dearest Georgina,

My sojourn at Netherfield continues to provide me with limitless opportunities to be both amused as well as confounded in every way that you could conceivably think of. As I write this letter to

you, Mr. Bennet’s eldest daughter, Jane Bennet, has found herself a bed here at Netherfield due to catching a sickness traveling here in the rain on horseback. Can you imagine? She had just casually ridden here on a family horse just so she could have dinner with Caroline and Louisa. It is unheard of that someone would be so bold as to be traveling right before a storm and so willingly let themselves get soaked to their bone just to see Caroline and Louisa. Then, the most startling of all, was the day after Jane arrived, her sister Elizabeth arrived on foot and covered with mud and sweat. If I may be so bold to say, these two Bennet daughters are certainly something compared to their younger sisters Lydia and Kitty. I have a feeling that you would enjoy talking to Jane and Elizabeth these two women have a personality I think you would enjoy.

And now I must beg your pardon, Georgina, for setting down my quill in the middle of writing. Caroline’s mindless banter is causing me to be distracted in a way that anything I should thoughtfully write become thoughtless gibberish. Suffice to say, I am slowly finding her company of the most annoying despite the short amount of time that I have spent with the Bingley family, however much I enjoy the company of Mister Bingley. So I must beg of your forgiveness and put aside this letter until I have a more convenient time to continue writing.

~*~

I must admit that, however, having Miss Elizabeth Bennet here at

Netherfield is something of a distasteful situation for me. While I have recommended the company of Jane and Elizabeth, Elizabeth proves to be an enigma of sorts as she is unlike any other female I know or have met. She gives me this feeling of distaste and this indescribable feeling of loathing, a feeling that I have yet to lay a finger on and my heart has yet to tell me. She gives me this feeling that I have heard described in poems, a feeling of true love that is supposed to be as boundless and always new like spring. However, I have yet to know what this feeling actually is so it is hard to say.

I think you may surmise how I am feeling from this short letter and how conflicted I must feel. You are my sister and you have always been able to figure out what I am feeling just by glancing at me or by the barest of words I put in a letter of mine. That is one of the greatest things I must ask again for your forgiveness as I seem to be pouring my feelings into this letter and you know how I do try to keep emotion out of these as much as possible. I enjoy our letters as I get to learn about what you are learning, how far you are progressing in your practice, and hear how things are going at home.

Remember to keep practicing, and, as always, love from your brother,

Fitzwilliam Darcy.

In this entry, James is eleven and experiences a scenario that could have inspired him to write The Pioneers.

October 28, 1801

Today father and I were on

our way to town so that he could conduct some business matters at the courthouse. About a mile outside we passed a mountain man walking with two deer carcasses over his shoulder, the weight of which was clearly taking a toll on his old and broken down frame. As we approached I could see that he was a very old man, likely in his seventies, with a long gray beard that stretched all the way down to the top of his trousers. I asked father if we could stop and give him a ride to town and was met with a swift smack to the back of my head. Father explained to me that people like him are a detriment to our society and their refusal to use our currency and follow all of our laws is holding back the progress of this country. He then went on to talk about how they are constantly seen poaching animals out of season and on the property of other people with no regard for the rights of anybody else but themselves. They act as if they own the entire world and are above the laws of the rest of us. As we passed him we made eye contact and he gave me a nod before going back to concentrating on the road. I kept glancing back periodically until there was no more trace of him behind us.

We then got to town and father began running all of his different errands, none of which were terribly interesting to me. After visiting a few shops and watching him negotiate deals on different goods we needed at home, our last stop was the courthouse where he needed to pick up some documents for work. Shortly after we had arrived at the courthouse, there arose a terrible racket in the middle of the marketplace just down the road. Father was busy inside talking with some of his business partners, so I decided to go down the road and investigate. I had to weave my way through a large crowd of angry townspeople which was growing larger by the minute. What I saw when I finally got close enough to the commotion was the same old mountain man we had passed earlier on the road walking to town who was being surrounded and yelled at by the merchants and townspeople. I went up to one of the men who was yelling at the old man and asked him if he knew what was going on and he told me that the vagabond had shot and killed the deer he was carrying on the property of the very man he was trying to sell them back to. I asked how the man knew the deer were from the merchant’s property but was quickly brushed off as the stranger went and joined the others. As the crowd continued to grow, I began to feel afraid for the safety of the mountain man because everyone continued to yell and close in around him. Soon a police officer arrived to break up the commotion and asked what was going on. The merchant then explained to the officer that the two deer the mountain man had brought to him were two that he had seen many times on his own property and that because he recognized them he knew that they had been poached from his property. The old man then explained that he had killed the deer nowhere near the man’s property and that he was in the public woods

when he had shot and killed them. After hearing both sides of the argument from the accuser and the accused the officer gave the carcasses to the merchant and took the mountain man off to jail. As I watched the wagon slowly pull away carrying the mountain man I was startled by my father’s hand landing on my shoulder. He told me that justice always finds a way of working itself out and there is no way to escape the law. We then went to our wagon and made our way back down the road to home.

Pain. There is pain. An amorphous collective of nerves, nearly dissolved and rocking in the waves. There is no I, just agony. An enormous crash of water carries it deeper, down into the infinite depths of the ocean. Deep, encompassing agony, rocking in the ancient rhythm of the ocean.

I am fighting to open my eyes. Fighting against the pain pulsing through this body, filling my being to volume. I can feel some boundary of myself, a membrane meeting the water, where my being ends and the ocean begins. A muffled rhythm undulates through the currents, the eighty-billion-year heartbeat of the universe. My attention drifts to my chest and sharper pain begins to drown out the constant throbbing, a new trill over the slow, pulsing agony of existence. Salt. The salt is cleansing the wounds in my heart, meaning that I still have a heart, that I am still a being. Not a scatter of nerve cells drifting in the ocean, but a being. A rush of images begins to surface in my mind, trying to remember, to garner my consciousness. I’m still fighting to open my eyes, struggling against the deep throbbing and the sharp stabbing in my chest. My mind settles into this new pain and there is a flash of wings, a flash of wings and sharp, hungry beaks, my heart erupting in searing, shredding torment. My eyes roll back and I am pulled down again into the depths again, the memory drowning once more in the water as I rock in the salty drifts.

The boy. What happened with the boy? I come back to consciousness and it hurts, but I saved the boy, the one with the hole in his heart. I open my eyes, struggling against the weight of centuries. The light of dozens of tiny moons refracts in the water around me and I remember my grandmother, my Gran who was there when the moons were made. Who carried this ocean from the really old country, the one that had blown up. Gran’s face appears before my eyes, warning me that things might go wobbly, warning me against taking the boy to find the flea. The boy with the hole in his heart, almost ripped to pieces by the hunger birds. For a moment, I let myself remember. I remember the flea, threatening to turn him inside out with his own sadness, how the sadness nearly overcame him. I see the boy running, ripping his hand from mine, furious at what those monsters had done to his world. I see the boy run at them and then freeze, and then before I know it

I’m running too, because he is my friend and he doesn’t understand what it means to die. And I dive and we’re on the ground and for two heartbeats we just breathe. “Idiot! Don’t move!” I hear myself whisper sharply, and then the shadows descend, all flapping wings and sharp beaks and talons. I can feel the boy freeze as they crash into me, one after another. And then pain, nothing but searing agony as they relentlessly tear at my heart, shredding and scavenging. The boy is screaming and I’m screaming and they’re digging deeper, trying to devour everything that I hold hidden inside. I’m screaming in pain and I can feel my frantic, grasping heartbeat before the whole world shudders and everything goes dark.

The next thing I know I am drifting in the undercurrents, the healing water diffusing into the deep wounds left by the hunger birds. The light from the moons breaks through the water around me, and I am regaining some of my own light, like tiny candle flames flickering in the water. For a moment I sense myself as the boy saw me in the ocean that day, before the hunger birds came, all silken-sheets the color of ice flowing in the waves and pouring light into the ocean. We knew everything then. We saw the universe, how fragile it is, made up of dark matter and that infinite crinkling blossom of space and time. I saw him, and he saw me, and we sang in the language of dreams, felt what it means to be whole. Not now, though. Now, I’m barely an I, a shattered being held together by memories. All because he let go of my hand. But they were going to tear out his heart, the one that already had a hole in it. He didn’t understand what it means to die, to dissolve into nothing but a handful of dust sprinkled throughout the universe. I couldn’t let him die. Now I’m rocking in the water with a shredded heart, waiting for the ocean to heal me. Hundreds of years of wisdom distilled into each drop of salty water, an ancient eau-de-vie drawn from the universe itself. I’ve been given to my ocean, and in it’s own time, it will give me back.

I’m calling to him, the boy—now a man—with the hole in his heart, drawing him to the shore, where the barriers between life and death are thin. I want to know if it was worth it, what he’s done with my pain. And how his heart is healing, because a story only matters to the extent that the people in the story change. Most of all, I want to know that when he looks inside himself he sees something of me and my ocean, that we help him grow whole.

I’ve found it! The last piece for the body! The right hand.

Now all that is left is for me to sew them altogether.

The search for various body parts has been exhausting. Finding newly buried graves are

the most useful. They are fresher and have less discoloration than the older parts I have found.

As I dug up this last grave tonight, I stared at the face of the deceased. I began to think about that person’s life. Who was he? What did he do? Does

he have a family? I wondered if his family misses him just as I miss my mother.

Life is such a fleeting thing, you never know what is going to happen next. I never thought my mother would die so quickly. I never thought that my father would outlive her. I always imagined her there when Elizabeth and I started a family. Fussing over her grandchildren spoiling them as grandmothers do. Now I look at my Father, he has lost his partner I wonder what his life is like. Is he going through the same pain and torment that floods my soul?

My father was never worthy of my mother’s love. He was always busy with his own affairs, he never had much time for us. I doubt he even misses her. My mother was always supportive of my endeavors, my father always disapproved.

I don’t think I can ever go back to that

house. It’s my family’s estate, my inheritance, but I would rather give it all up and live here, in Ingolstadt. I don’t think Elizabeth would want that though, Geneva is her home too. She hasn’t had the luxury of leaving it and exploring the world, if she had I think she would see it for all its faults. God only knows what nonsense my father has been

filling her head with in my absence. He is turning her against me just as he did my own mother. Oh! If only I could have her back with me, back in my arms! No one else’s love can ever replace hers. She was a saint in a fallen world. And never again will I be happy on this earth!

あそこ何 asoko nani what exists out there

宇宙の秘密 uchuu no himitsu secrets of the universe

何もない nani mo nai nothing is out there

春初め haru hajime beginning of spring

青春終わり seishun owari springtime of youth is ending

星に行く hoshi ni iku head off to the stars

なぜがいるか naze ga iru ka why do I exist?

空中見える sora naka mieru in the sky it can be seen

意味がない imi ga nai there is no meaning

偽の友

nise no tomo a sham of a friend

尊重はうそ sonchou wa uso your respect was just a lie

死去が来た shikyo ga kita (our) death(s) have arrived

After a series of life-changing events cause him to reevaluate his basic worldview, Rick Deckard comes towards a very interesting conclusion by the end of the book (Dick 606). Finding a frog, he briefly gets excited that he could have a living pet as he always wanted, but he soon learns that it is mechanical. However, rather than be crushed by this discovery, he embraces it. He decides that he wants to care for the mechanical creature anyway, and in doing so completely breaks out of the capitalist cycle that had been dominating his world. He knows that there is practically no difference between the mechanical frog and a real frog, and ultimately decides that he’s okay using the mechanical one instead. Through this decision, Rick Deckard makes it impossible for his decisions to be manipulated by anything in the story, because he’s decided that he doesn’t need something to be practical, universally popular, or even real for him to be confident in believing in it. This runs rather counter to the standard Marxist idea that love of objects is what will allow for the classes of the economy to be manipulated. Typically, it is understood that Marxist studies “…[follow] Marx in defining commodity fetishism as a force that instills life into inanimate objects by endowing them with the vitality of human relations; the paranoia that this process generates becomes a necessary condition of postmodernity,” (Enns 68). However, with this new development, Deckard is able to fetishize whatever commodity he wants without being tied down to following the leader. Enns later argues that “…paranoid schizophrenics and androids become interchangeable in Dick’s works because they are both figures of hybridity that “are associated with unstable boundaries between self and world,” (Enns 68). By this, he continues the theme of reality as being an unimportant detail in life. There’s no reason for Deckard to keep buying into whatever the corporations want him to.

This is also explored in the character of Mercer. A popular religion, Mercerism asks people across the world to fuse with this suffering man in order to connect humans on a level we all understand: overcoming great obstacles, even in death. One of the twists of the novel involves Rick Deckard discovering that Mercerism is a completely staged and fake set up, and is completely a government creation. In theory, this would render the whole religion pointless, and make any and all time invested in the system a complete waste. Mercer convinces Deckard, however, not to see it that way. Mercer argues that if you agree with the ideas behind the religion anyway, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t keep on believing in it. It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not, that isn’t the point. The point is that the message, or that idea, or that animal that a person wants to own so bad. If the real thing and the fake thing are truly indistinguishable, than there is no reason to select one over the other beyond simple convenience. Mercerism allows humans to all share an experience of the most intense emotions on the spectrum, as Mercer climbs up that hill towards his death. There is shown to be real merit in people having this kind of strong connection to each other. If this is the case, then Dick seems to be arguing that people should just take part in it all anyway, especially if it makes the world a better place (Dick 580).

According to Jill Galvan, “Do Androids Dream tells the story of one individual’s gradual acceptance of these changing parameters,” (Galvan 414). There could be no greater explanation of

the point of this story. It forces Rick Deckard’s mind to open up to new possibilities. It changes his perspective. It makes him understand that he doesn’t have to be a simple sheep following the masses, under the rule of his corporate masters. He can break off and do his own crazy thing, and in many ways, that’s the best thing for him to do. His new perspective comes with liberation and freedom. A great deal of responsibility comes with it, of course, as the danger of completely detaching from society and becoming a non-factor is entirely possible. But this world is so depressed; it’s like this might even be what Rick Deckard wants. To just exist somewhere else, not having to stay all caught up in the crazy trends of his human brothers and sisters, but rather

to control his own choices based on what personally works best with him seems to be the goal he wants the most out of life by the end. This novel has many, many layers of fictional re-invention going on, but it all comes to a single point at the very end. Ultimately, there’s just something fantastic about the difference between the real and unreal, and we just can’t understand it. We just need to accept it.

Warning: The following material is rated PG-13 for violence and minor sexuality.

Scene: The interior of a jail cell. It is dark; faint moonlight comes from a high window. It illuminates the room enough for us to see the shabby mattress with its tattered blanket. Sitting on the floor by the head of the bed sits a young man or about 16. It is our protagonist, Steve Harmon. The top of his prison issued orange jumpsuit is hanging around his waist; a white

wifebeater stands out against his dark complexion. On the floor next to him lies an open journal, a pen between the pages.

Close up (CU) of Steve’s face. The remnants of tears are seen on his cheeks. A voiceover plays over top of the scene.

Steve: Another night in this

dungeon. Another night without sleep. How can anybody sleep in this cold?

CU of his socks, zooming out to a mid-shot (MS) of the boy.

You put on the only pairs of socks you own, and you still can’t feel your toes. You would think they’d turn up the heat in this place, but who really wants the prisoners to be comfortable? It’s anything but comfy here. The floor is freezing, it’s dark, and you can hear the guy getting raped a couple cells down. I try really hard to ignore the screams, but some things are really hard to ignore.

Aerial shot of Steve and bed. Slowly zoom in to the tattered pillow.

I’d be more comfortable sleeping on the cement than on that bed. The lumps are killing my back. It smells like sweat and piss. I don’t know how anybody could sweat in this place. Maybe it gets hot in the summer. I hope I’m not here in the summer.

CU on a tear as it rolls down his face.

What am I talking about? There’s no hope in here. Every day is the same. They lead us to the cafeteria, pushing and shoving when we go too slow or step out of line. Somebody might get tazed if he starts smart mouthin’ off to the guards.

Zoom out. Steve’s face takes up the entire screen. We can see the desperation growing in his eyes. The whites of his eyes are bloodshot. His lips are chapped, cracked and bleeding from dehydration.

They feed us slop as if we were pigs being prepared for slaughter. It looks and tastes like baby food. I’ve stopped eating it. It only makes me throw up.

Cut to a shot of the bars of Steve’s jail.

The last time I threw up all over the Boss’s shoes. He’s not really the boss, just a guard who thinks he’s tough. Needless to say he was not happy. He smacked me around a lot, but the worst part was when he made me lick my own vomit off of his shoes. He wouldn’t let me stop until it was all gone. I wanted to die right then and there. Boss said next time, it wouldn’t be his shoes I was putting in my mouth.

CU of the pen in Steve’s notebook. We can see that the end has been broken off, leaving a sharp, jagged edge.

I haven’t told anybody about it. Boss said if I did, then I’d be the next one screaming in the dark. I don’t want to do it. I don’t want him to rape me. I just want to go home…

Steve takes up the pen, and brings the jagged edge into the light.

They won’t let me go home. I’m never getting out of here. My lawyer can’t understand what I’m going through. I can’t tell her anything. If I tell her what happened, then King will hurt me during lunch or rec time. If I tell her about Boss, he’ll kill me. I have to keep quiet, but that means I’ll have to stay here. I don’t want to stay here.

Steve brings the sharp end of the pen, a makeshift

blade, to the vein at the base of his wrist.

I just want to go home.

He draws the blade over his wrist. CU on the thin trail of blood begins to well up and drip onto the floor.

I just want to go home.

Blackout.

Empty chairs face

the pallid walls

As time slowly crawls

And the length of the day draws on.

We have all gone to Mars

There is nowhere

to go for lunch

And no saucers, not even on the shelf.

Monet’s work is hung to color the room,

But only succeeds in being acknowledged.

A chill bites the air as the heater is turned on.

Soon it will be time to leave,

Only to return in the morning

To do it all over.

Time is an illusion.

Lunchtime doubly so.