The Man in the High Castle: Chapters 1–3

“Please recall; you promised it sometime last week.” The fussy, brisk voice, barely polite, barely keeping the code. "Did I not give you a deposit, sir, Mr. Childan, with that stipulation?"

Tagomi deliberately mispronounced the name; insult within the code that made Childan’s ears burn. Place pulled, the dreadful mortification of their situation.

Business ability. Scrape up a fully restored 1929 Ford including fabric top (black). Grand slam to keep patronage forever.

He could for instance slip across into the Rocky Mountain States. But it was loosely banded to the PSA, and might extradite him.

In 1947, on Capitulation Day, he had more or less gone berserk.

A shark who had never made repairs, had partitioned rooms smaller and smaller, raised rents...Omuro had gouged the poor, especially the nearly destitute jobless ex-servicemen during the depression years of the early ’fifties.

Yet, there was after all something humorous about it, the picture of stolid, grumpy Germans walking around on Mars, on the red sand where no humans had ever stepped before.

The radio said: “Co-Prosperity Civilization must pause and consider whether in our quest to provide a balanced equity of mutual duties and responsibilities coupled with remunerations...”

Typical jargon from the ruling hierarchy, Frink noted.

“...and we have deplored often in the past the dreadful waste of humans in this fanatical striving which sets the broader mass of men wholly outside the legal community.”

It was the morning ablution.

There was something fatuous about Hexagram Fifteen. Too goody-goody. Naturally he should be modest. Perhaps there was an idea in it, however.

He, Juliana, the factory on Gough Street, the Trade Missions that ruled, the exploration of the planets, the billion chemical heaps in Africa that were now not even corpses, the aspirations of the thousands around him in the shanty warrens of San Francisco, the mad creatures in Berlin with their calm faces and manic plans—all connected in this moment of casting the yarrow stalks to select the exact wisdom appropriate in a book begun in the thirtieth century B.C.

A book created by the sages of China over a period of five thousand years, winnowed, perfected, that superb cosmology—and science—codified before Europe had even learned to do long division.

But above and beyond everything else, he had originally been drawn by her screwball expression; for no reason, Juliana greeted strangers with a portentous, nudnik, Mona Lisa smile that hung them up between responses, whether to say hello or not.

Mr. Tagomi had never ridden on such a ship; when he met Mr. Baynes he would have to take care to appear blasé, no matter how large the rocket turned out to be.

“Our nearest neighbor, and so far the most unrewarding except for military purposes.” Sic! Mr. Tagomi thought, using high-place Latin word. Clue to Mr. Baynes. Looks askance at merely military.

Mr. Tagomi began, “I inquired of the oracle, 'Will the meeting between myself and Mr. Childan be profitable?’ and obtained to my dismay the ominous hexagram The Preponderance of the Great..."

"Therefore we will cater to his prejudice and graft a priceless American artifact to him instead.”

“I have further consulted the oracle. For purposes of policy, I cannot divulge to you, Mr. Ramsey, the question.”

But Mr. Tagomi, in asking the question, had had a deeper query in the back of his mind, one of which he was barely conscious. As so often, the oracle had perceived that more fundamental query and, while answering the other, had taken it upon itself to answer the subliminal one, too.

The Pacific had nothing of this sort; natural fibers such as wood were still used, and of course the ubiquitous pot metals.

The key phrase, “Skim milk in his diet,” referred to Pinafore, to the eerie song that expounded the doctrine, “...Things are seldom what they seem—Skim milk masquerades as cream.”

It is true he does not fit in with his environment, inasmuch as he is too brusque and pays too little attention to form.

The separate skill, apart from the rest of him: he had found the right thing, and Mr. Tagomi would be mollified and his client, whoever he was, would be overjoyed.

He had been able to procure, miraculously, an almost mint copy of Volume One, Number One of Tip Top Comics.

The various modes of address...he knew them. Whom to treat politely, whom rudely. Be brusque with the doorman, elevator operator, receptionist, guide, any janitorial person. Bow to any Japanese, of course, even if it obliged him to bow hundreds of times. But the pinocs. Nebulous area.

Mr. Tagomi’s client would probably be portly, a businessman, smoking a Philippine cigar.

A glance upward at the towering edifice, the highest building in San Francisco.

The girl who need not fear marauding homeless from the desert.

Learned that, she thought, from Japanese. Imbibed placid attitude toward mortality, along with money-making judo.

Later, she sat in a booth at Tasty Charley’s Broiled Hamburgers, listlessly reading the menu.

They’re not idealists like Joe and me; they’re cynics with utter faith.

That’s why they, those elite SS fairies, have that angelic simper, that blond babylike innocence; they’re saving themselves for Mama.

Obviously, it was God’s sardonic vengeance, right out of some silent movie.

“Plastics. Polyesters. Resins. Ersatz—industrial uses. Do you see? No consumers’ commodities.”

Your abstract art represented a period of spiritual decadence, of spiritual chaos, due to the disintegration of society, the old plutocracy.

The Jewish and capitalist millionaires, the international set that supported the decadent art.

They identify with God’s power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate—confusion between him who worships and that which is worshiped.

"This is most authentic of dying old U.S. culture, a rare retained artifact carrying flavor of bygone halcyon day.”