Robert Pirsig - Lila. An Inquiry Into Morals

It was the doll.

She’d left it behind.

That was sort of sad too. After all the fuss she’d made over it, now she just walks off and leaves it. It left a feeling of immorality too. What do you think of a small girl who goes off and leaves her doll alone and abandoned? Will she do that when she grows up?

He got up and looked at it.

It was just an ordinary machine-molded rubber doll — not a very expensive one. It had no moving eyes. Its brown hair was part of the machine-molding. He saw that one spot on the head was abraded where it had evidently rubbed against something in the river for a long time. But probably if it had been glued-on hair it would have all come off by now.

There was something really sad about it, sitting there all bare-naked and sexless. Something innocent. Something wronged. He didn’t like to look at it. He didn’t want to be involved with it… What the hell was he going to do with it?… He didn’t want to keep it on the boat.

He supposed he could just throw it overboard. It’d look like all the other trash on the beach. No one would know the difference. Probably that’s where it was headed anyway before Lila fished it out of the river.

Beside it was a shirt that didn’t look like one of his. It looked new and clean. He picked it up. There was a sharp pin in it which he pulled out and set on the chart table. It must really be new, he thought, if it’s still got pins in it.

When he tried to put it on he couldn’t get the buttons buttoned without exhaling. It was too small. It couldn’t be one of his. Lila must have left it. What was Lila doing with a man’s new shirt? Now he was beginning to remember she had wrapped the doll in something that looked like this. That’s probably where it came from. But why should she have bought a shirt for the doll? She really was into some kind of fantasy world.

Well, if that’s what she bought it for, to cover up this doll, that seemed like a perfect use for it right now. Maybe it would help overcome this wronged feeling the doll gave off.

He slipped the shirt over the doll’s head. It came down way over the doll’s feet like a nightshirt. That looked better. He buttoned the collar around its neck. Something about this doll was giving it all kinds of Quality the manufacturer had never built into it. Lila had overlaid a whole set of value patterns on top of it and those values were still clinging to it. It was almost like some religious idol.

He set it on the edge of the pilot berth, and went back and sat down and stared at it for a while. It looked better with the shirt on.

An idol, that’s what this doll was. It was a genuine religious idol of an abandoned religion of one. It had all those formidable characteristics that idols always have. That’s what spooked him. Once they’ve been ritualized and adored, these idols change in value. You can no more throw them away casually than you can throw an old church statue on the dump.

He wondered what they actually did with old abandoned church statues. Did they have a desanctification ceremony of some sort? He remembered he’d been going to have a funeral for this idol for Lila’s benefit. Maybe he ought to give it one for his own benefit. Just to put it somewhere without turning it into trash.

Funny feelings. Anthropologists could do a lot with idols. Maybe they already had. He seemed to remember a book he’d always wanted to read called The Masks of God. You could discover a lot about a culture by what it said about its idols. The idols would be an objectification of the culture’s innermost values, which were its reality.

This doll represented Lila’s innermost values, the real Lila, and it said something about her that completely contradicted everything else. It indicated there were two contradictory patterns conflicting with some enormous force and what had happened was some kind of shift in these tectonic plates that had produced a kind of high Richter-scale earthquake. The one pattern, the one Rigel denounced, was going one way. This doll represented a pattern that was going another way, and so this idol allowed Lila to objectify the other pattern and ease the pressures that were causing the earthquake. And now she’s abandoned it — evidence that she’s going back to something worse. Maybe not.

Maybe to keep from going to something worse himself he should bury it with dignity, he thought, just for his own benefit.

He heard a klunk and realized it was the dinghy. The groceries were still down there. Everything had happened so fast he’d forgotten all about them.

He went up on deck, lowered himself into the dinghy and then lifted the grocery bags up onto the deck of the boat. Now, with Lila gone, he had enough food to get to Norfolk, at least. It would probably go bad before then.

He got back on deck and lowered the canvas bags one by one down into the cabin where he set them on the berth and then brought out their contents and put them into the icebox. Then he looked at the doll-idol.

He picked it up and tucked it under one arm like a child of his own and brought it up on deck, where he set it down carefully. Then he stepped down into the dinghy again and brought the doll down and placed it on the stern thwart ahead of him and rowed ashore. Good thing he had this shirt to wrap over this idol if he needed to. If someone came along he’d have a hard time explaining.

The trail passed by low shrubs with small thick leaves and tiny blue-gray berries. It was paved with small orange-tan stones and sand, and there were pieces of dry grass on it — hollow round reeds broken into six-inch pieces, about a quarter of an inch thick, laid in whirligig patterns. He wondered if the hurricane had done that. Ahead, on one side by some fading goldenrod was a Department of Interior survey marker.

Later on was a nicely-made painted sign asking people to keep out of the marsh to protect the wildlife. It was good that the main road to town didn’t have access to this area. It made it much more isolated.

He heard a honking of geese overhead. He looked up and saw about thirty or forty geese flying in a V-formation, northwest, the wrong way… Crazy geese. This warm spell must have gotten to them.

Walking along with this idol Phædrus felt as if the two of them were sharing this experience, as though he were back in childhood again and this were some imaginary companion. Little children talk to dolls and grown-up adults talk to idols. He supposed that a doll allows a child to pretend he’s a parent while an idol allows a parent to pretend he’s a child.

He reflected on this for a while and then his mind framed a question: What would you say, he asked the idol, if we were in India now? What would you say to all this?

He listened for a long time but there was no response. Then after a while into his thoughts came a voice that did not seem to be his own.

All this is a happy ending.

Happy ending? Phædrus thought about it for a while.

I wouldn’t call it a happy ending, he said, I’d call it an inconclusive ending.

No, this is a happy ending for everyone, the other voice said.

Why?

Because everybody gets what he wants, the voice said.

Lila gets her precious Richard Rigel, Rigel gets his precious self-righteousness, you get your precious Dynamic freedom, and I get to go swimming again.

Oh, you know what’s going to happen?

Yes, of course, the idol said.

Then how can you say it’s a happy ending when you know what’s going to happen to Lila?

It’s not a problem, the idol’s voice said.

Not a problem? He’s going to try to lock her up for life and that’s not a problem?