Quality Reading

What I am is a heretic who’s recant­ed, and there­by in every­one’s eyes saved his soul. Every­one’s eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.

I sur­vive main­ly by pleas­ing oth­ers. You do that to get out. To get out you fig­ure out what they want you to say and then you say it with as much skill and orig­i­nal­i­ty as pos­si­ble and then, if they’re con­vinced, you get out. If I had­n’t turned on him I’d still be there, but he was true to what he believed right to the end. That’s the dif­fer­ence between us, and Chris knows it. And that’s the rea­son why some­times I feel he’s the real­i­ty and I’m the ghost.

Great stuff. This book is a reread for me. I picked it up some­time in my teens. The book mean­ders pleas­ant­ly across the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy, hit­ting some very crit­i­cal points as it jus­ti­fies the «insane» notion that there is a Qual­i­ty, or Virtue (I think the Taoists would call it Te) that pre­cedes dialec­tic. Pir­sig con­scious­ly res­ur­rects the Sophists and strikes out at the val­ues of a soci­ety ruled by pure reason.

I thought it beau­ti­ful the way that Pir­sig simul­ta­ne­ous­ly demon­satrat­ed the fal­la­cy and util­i­ty of dual­i­ty. He showed that a motor­cy­cle is made up not only of parts, but of sys­tems and sub­sys­tems that pro­vide inter­re­lat­ed func­tions. It’s impor­tant and nec­es­sary to see a gear’s rela­tion to the dri­ve­train, but a dri­ve­train is not an item that one can find at the auto­mo­tive parts store. These are arti­fi­cial bound­aries that allow us to encap­su­late cer­tain chains of events and see things func­tion­ing or mal­func­tion­ing. Dual­ism is hat­ed by those that love a val­ue­less life and espoused by those that see val­ues as lim­its. Very few peo­ple seem to see it as a use­ful and valu­able cre­ation of the human imagination.

And of course there are 10 kinds of peo­ple in the world, those who under­stand bina­ry arith­mat­ic and those who don’t.

Read­ing this book now feels almost as though I’m com­ing full cir­cle. When I first read it I did­n’t under­stand the fear of los­ing myself, only the fear of being seen as insane. Now that I’m try­ing very hard to redis­cov­er my own Qual­i­ty, after spend­ing so many years con­cerned only with what oth­ers think of me, I can see the way out of the trap that Pir­sig presents instead of see­ing the trap as a desir­able tech­nique. Say what they want you to say, or else face elec­troshock ther­a­py. Being six­teen and watch­ing friends get cart­ed off «to get the help they need» was enough to teach me the les­son that this book rebels against: Keep your mouth shut and for gods sake don’t let any­one find out what you real­ly are.

Read­ing ZATAOMM now I hear a dif­fer­ent les­son: you’ve wast­ed thir­ty-five years, don’t let the rest go to the dogs.