Here are some of my favorite lines from Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance so far (page
numbers might be about 11 pages off for you since I’ve got the wrong edition):
- “You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.” (3)
- “It was the attitude that found it, nothing else.” (27)
- “You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations.” (51)
I have several others highlighted, but I’ve noticed that all
of the quotes follow the same kind of simple, obvious logic that we shouldn’t
have to be told but that we’ve forgotten about – the kind of things that seem
“un-sci-en-ti-fic” and more supernatural. I really like being reminded that
truth is subjective, and you have to actually open your eyes and be active in
order to find your own kind of truth, rather than just eat what the world is
feeding you. It’s kind of like a nice way of rebelling – letting the world
believe what it believes but at the same time being able to slough off those
suggestions (acknowledging that they are just suggestions) and do what you want
to do, see what you want to see.
And then this is were it gets difficult, and tricky, because
we don’t necessarily want to actually try and see things for ourselves, because
it is much easier to chew and swallow than hunt and gather.
This tread sort of reminds me of a topic that I heard at the
beginning of class Tuesday but only heard the gist of the conversation –
college life vs. the real world. The idea of looking at the world through a
moving car, with the car as the frame and the window to the world, is kind of
like college life to me. I’m sure it’s not for other people, but I do see a
distinction in that while we’re in school (and I mean the students who as of
yet have no professional life, etc) we are constantly told that we will have to
do and know certain things at our jobs or “after college.” Really, we’re just
seeing the world through the frame of college, through the frame of
inexperience and fear of what might really be out there. It’s not that the
world is necessarily different; we just haven’t really been able to experience
it for ourselves, and decide to see what we want to see. I don’t know if we can
actually chock that up to the educational system or just because we have young
minds, some of us.
I also think that the world wants to force us toward that
end game, too, instead of letting us take our time at it. We must be processed
through 4 years of college and then shipped off to work at our desks 8 hours a
day, etc – while this is becoming less of a norm, I think the idea still
remains the same, at least partly because of capitalism. We must work,
therefore we must take necessary steps toward finding our place as soon as
possible in order to be more efficient for production. Surely, we should like
what we do, but we should be absolutely miserable until we find where we should
be.
Hannah,
ReplyDeleteI like the metaphor of eating that you've touched on in your post. I think I too readily eat what the world is feeding me and indeed it is easier than hunting and gathering. This insight coupled with college-car-window commentary makes me wonder about the real world. I mean, what is the real world? I'm now reflecting on my immersion in this 4-year ritual that turned into 6 and wondering what's next. The professional world doesn't seem to be the real world either. The real world is maybe somewhere else outside of all the conformity. I hope I don't enter into a 50-year ritual, that is, work, and lose myself all over again. I better just be a writer, so I can create the real world to be whatever I want it to be. Or maybe the real world really only ever is in human imagination. hmmm...
-Aaron
The quote “you follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations" intrigues me as well. It makes me think of tugging on a stray thread until the entire piece of fabric begins to unravel.
ReplyDeleteI remember a particular line from last semester (although I can't recall which classical rhetorician raised this point) which went something like this: "rhetoric ought not to be concerned with absolute truth, because we as humans wouldn't know absolute truth if we saw it."
That thought amused me greatly.
As for being able to identify and examine what we might personally view as true...like Aaron, I really like your observation that "it is much easier to chew and swallow than hunt and gather."