"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (by Rob Pirsig)

I began reading this book about a week ago, and so far so good. It's actually very ironic that I picked it up and started reading it at this time in my life, just because I lot of the broad issues it touches on, such as  technology, rationality, and beauty (as in romanticism), are also issues that I have recently studied in classes, discussed with friends, or have simply come to think about a lot in the sense of how I fit in with that particular school of thought and how that thought fits in with the world.

Here's a very interesting excerpt from the book:

"When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. Mark Twain's experience comes to mind, in which after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something IS always killed. But what is less noticed in the arts-- something is always created too. And instead of just dwelling on what is killed it's important also to see what's created and to see the process as a kind of death-birth continuity that is neither good nor bad, but just IS."

This passage may seem very random and out of place and you probably are very confused reading it since you don't know the context it came out of, but no worries. Even with the book's context applied, the passage still is out of place and makes very little sense. Whenever the author deviates from his narrative or reality and goes into tangents on rationality and ghosts and what is real and what is not, you basically have no idea what he's talking about. That's not always a bad thing, though, because sometimes you have to have no idea what someone is talking about in order to discover some new bit of knowledge.

But back to the excerpt, I agree and can relate to his first claim, then when you fully understand the analytic knowledge of something it DOES lose its beauty. I have always loved writing, so when I had to start thinking back in high school about what I wanted to be when I grew up (funny isn't it, how we're never fully "grown up", how we are always still aspiring to that thing which we want to be, "when we grow up") and I made the obvious decision to follow my passion for writing and become a journalist. But after three years of clumsily shodding my way through the school newspaper in high school and then diving into rigorous and terribly difficult journalism writing classes in college and spending months and months trying to land a position at the college newspaper, and then when I did, realizing how I am in no way cut out for the ugliness and crassness of the newsroom, I quit. I had too. Writing had become gray, black, and ugly. It was no longer a beautiful blue sky or a bright orange sun shine. Analytically understanding and dissecting writing killed the natural art of writing for me. (Although the book talks about killing something off always creates something new, well I have yet to really discover what that is, but when I do, I'll let you know).

One more thing relating to the aforementioned excerpt, I do NOT agree with the author's claim that something can be seen as "neither good nor bad, but just is." Here he is referring the a life-like cycle of death and rebirth that are the effect of analytic thought, but that is not important. What is crucial is how WRONG he is. EVERYTHING is either good or bad. Nothing is NOTHING. Similarly to how the fact of gravity existed way before the scientific discovery of gravitational force was made (got that from the book too!), nothing can exist with out being good or bad. What's in the middle? There is no middle. There is no "OK" in life. Because where does something fit into OK if it is not good or bad? OK is a socially conceptualized expression of laziness. Sunshine is good. Vampires are bad. Tofu is..... well, i say it's good, but most of society would yell at me that it is disgusting and nasty and bad. So yes, some truth are subjective, many are actually. The point is, how even though I fully believe that everything has a good or a bad truth to it, it is still SO hard to distinguish this absolute truth in my daily life. So often I cannot tell if an action or decision is good or bad, or it just never crosses my mind as to if what I do is bad then I shouldn't do it, or if what I do is good then I should do it more often.

So my challenge to you after this lengthy tirade is this: Think about what you consider to be absolute truth in your life, whether it has to deal with abortion, gay rights, family issues, broken friendships, love. Why are they absolutely Good or Bad to you, but completely opposite to someone else. What is your role in figuring out what they mean to you and backing that up with conviction? And most importantly, how do you deal with the gray areas, the things in your life that you can't figure out if they are wholly good or wholly bad?