Sunday, September 9, 2012

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with debris of thoughts grown stale with platitudes too often repeated. “What’s new?” is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question “What is best?”, a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and “best” was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now.

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance