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“I can remember so many worlds,” she said. “I’m not sure what I mean by that … but there are so many worlds and I just touch them and I’m in them for a moment and then I’m out of them again.…
“She’s not like me at all,” Lila said. “She had dark hair, really beautiful dark hair and a beautiful figure and she had what you call a ‘magnetic personality.’ You know what I mean? She really liked everybody who was there and they all liked her too. She didn’t act like she thought she was any better than anybody else.…
And all the time the boat was floating down the river through the palm trees in the dark and it was so beautiful.
“Prostitution?” “Yeah. It’s all taking the customer’s money and giving him exactly what he wants and then leaving him poorer than when he started.
That’s why she’s a hustler. They were paying her to imitate someone making love to them.”
Some music from one station was close and dreamy, the kind anyone could dance to.
Sidney was the kind you always knew was going to be a doctor or lawyer or something like that. He was always supposed to be so nice but you could never talk to him really. He was always looking down on you and he thought you didn’t know it.
He knew something. She wished she could remember what he said. He talked about some Indians and he said something about good and evil. Why should he talk like that?
Everything seemed so dreamy. Like she didn’t really belong here. There was something wrong with her, she knew there was. But nobody would tell her what it was.
He pulled the sail down as fast as he could, furled it with a single stop and got back to the tiller again before the boat lost its heading.
And yet there in the middle of this “Lila Jungle” are ancient prehistoric ruins of past civilizations. You could dig into those ruins like an archaeologist layer by layer, through regressive centuries of civilization, measuring by the distance down in the soil, the distance back in time.
If life is to be explained on the basis of physical laws, then the overwhelming evidence that life deliberately works around these laws cannot be ignored.
They only go along with laws of any kind because they have to, preferring an existence that does not follow any laws whatsoever.
What the Metaphysics of Quality has done is unite these opposed doctrines within a larger metaphysical structure that accommodates both of them without contradiction.
Phædrus thought this ambiguity of carbon’s bonding preferences was the situation the weak Dynamic subatomic forces needed.
Inorganic, Biological, Social and Intellectual
the electronic circuits and the programs existing in the same computer at the same time have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
Everything was seen from a pure and symbolic world of logical relationships that had no resemblance at all to the “real” world he had worked in.
And what amazed him most of all was how one could spend all of eternity probing the electrical patterns of that computer with an oscilloscope and never find that novel.
The same program can be made to run on an infinite variety of computers.
Now this vagueness is removed by sorting out values according to levels of evolution. The value that holds a glass of water together is an inorganic pattern of value. The value that holds a nation together is a social pattern of value. They are completely different from each other because they are at different evolutionary levels.
In a value-centered Metaphysics of Quality the four sets of static patterns are not isolated into separate compartments of mind and matter.
the Metaphysics of Quality this dilemma doesn’t come up. To the extent that one’s behavior is controlled by static patterns of quality it is without choice. But to the extent that one follows Dynamic Quality, which is undefinable, one’s behavior is free.
The only time he had been more manic about an abstract idea was when he had first hit upon the idea of undefined Quality itself.
was, for him, a great Dynamic breakthrough, but if he wanted to hang on to it he had better do some static latching as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
Latching was what was needed all right. Historically every effort to unite science and ethics has been a disaster. You can’t paste a moral system on top of a pile of amoral objective matter.
given a value-centered Metaphysics of Quality, it is absolutely, scientifically moral for a doctor to prefer the patient.
Does this justify genocide and indusrialization?
A primitive isolated village threatened by brigands has a moral right and obligation to kill them in self-defense since a village is a higher form of evolution.
is more moral for an idea to kill a society than it is for a society to kill an idea.
Do we have such an idea in your metaphysics Mr pirsig?
Biologically she’s fine, socially she’s pretty far down the scale, intellectually she’s nowhere. But Dynamically … Ah! That’s the one to watch.
He supposed you could call it a “code of Art” or something like that, but art is usually thought of as such a frill that that title undercuts its importance.
What was emerging was that the static patterns that hold one level of organization together are often the same patterns that another level of organization must fight to maintain its own existence.
As new patterns evolve they come into conflict with old ones. Each stage of evolution creates in its wake a wash of problems.
That’s the theme song of the twentieth century. Is society going to dominate intellect or is intellect going to dominate society?
“This boat?” “No, a boat that never got finished,” he said. “Everything went wrong.”
Zen? his original ideas on qulity that lead to breakdown? No analogy?
Mexicans know what I mean. There’s always this feeling that this sadness is the real truth about things and it’s better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up here in the North.”
In the past anthropology has been centered around collective objects and I’m interested in probing around to see if it can be better said in terms of individual values.
I can take parts of your language and your values and trace them to old patterns that were laid down centuries ago and are what make you what you are.”
It’s like a storm coming and I don’t have any house. I don’t have anywhere to go.”
Lila remembered she still had the black funeral dress. She remembered she had to wear it three times that year. There were hundreds of people who came to her grandfather’s funeral because he was a minister and lots of Jerry’s friends came to his funeral, but nobody came for Dawn.
“Nobody liked him very much. He was very smart and he was always trying to tell you about things you weren’t interested in.”
He was smart but at the same time he was dumb. And he could never see how dumb he was because he thought he knew everything. Everyone used to call him Sad Sack.”
“He was weak. He always complained about how she ran his life, but he really wanted her to. That’s why he wanted to go back.
“Women are very deep,” Lila said. “But men never see it. They’re too selfish. They always want women to understand them. And that’s all they ever care about. That’s why they always have to try to destroy them.”
That smile. That’s what he remembered most. There it was. Lila on the streetcar. Lila and the lilacs in spring. The little suppressed smile. The little half-hidden contempt. And the sadness that nothing he could do or say could ever make her smile at him in any other way.
The littlest ones were so thin and transparent he saw them mainly by refraction of the shimmering water above them as they passed between him and a dark shape suspended on the surface. The dark shape was like that of a boat which from the bottom of the ocean seemed more like a spaceship suspended in the sky.
That’s the way it always is. The intelligence of the mind can’t think of any reason to live, but it goes on anyway because the intelligence of the cells can’t think of any reason to die.
The intelligence of her cells had switched Lila off for the night, exactly the way a hardware switch turns off a computer program.
This was manic New York, now. Later would come depressive New York. Now everything’s exciting because it’s so different. As soon as the excitement wears off depression will come. It always does.
If you follow that fallacy long enough you come out with the conclusion that individual electrons contain the intelligence needed to build New York City all by themselves. Absurd.
