Robert Pirsig - Lila. An Inquiry Into Morals

In Kingston Phædrus' boat had been a tethered home from which the dock and harbor seemed like a local neighborhood. But here, out on the broad river, the neighborhood was gone and that below-decks home was just a storage area in which the chief concern was that things did not shift and crash when the boat heeled in the wind. Now, above deck, his attention was given to sail shape and wind direction and river current, and to the chart on the deck beside him folded to correspond to landmarks and day beacons and the progression of red and green buoys showing the way to the ocean. The river was brown with silt and there was a lot of debris in it but nothing he couldn’t avoid. There was a nice running-breeze, but it was gusting and shifting a little, probably from deflection by the river valley.

He felt depressed. That Rigel had really gotten to him. Someday, maybe, he would develop a thick enough skin to not get bothered by someone like that, but the day hadn’t arrived yet. Somehow he’d gotten the idea that a sailboat provided isolation and peace and tranquillity, in which thoughts could proceed freely and calmly without outside interference. It never happened. A sailboat under way means one hazard after another with little time to think about anything but its needs. And a sailboat at the dock is an irresistible magnet for every conversation-making passer-by in sight.

He’d gotten resigned to it, and Rigel, when he’d met him, was just one of the hundreds of here-today-gone-tomorrow people that cruising causes you to meet. Lila was in that class too… and there was a lot to be said for the kind of wandering life where you never knew who you would be tied up against — or sleeping with — the next night.

What depressed most was the stupid way he had let himself be set up for Rigel’s attack. He had probably been invited to breakfast just to receive that little sermon. Now he’d brood for days and go over everything that was said and recycle every word over and over again and think of perfect answers that he should have said at the time.

A small power boat approached, coming the other way. As they passed, the helmsman waved from inside the cabin, and Phædrus waved back.

The weather was turning out better than he’d thought it would. Yesterday’s stiff north wind was dying and warm southwesterlies would probably take over, which meant a few days of good weather. The river was broad here and the current would be with him for most of the day. This would be a nice day if it hadn’t been for that scene this morning.

The feeling left was one of enormous confusion and weariness, a kind of back-to-the-drawing-board, back-to-square-one feeling you get where you’re thinking you’re making great progress and then suddenly some question like this comes along and sets you back to where you started. He didn’t even want to think about it.

There are so many kinds of problem people like Rigel around, he thought, but the ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals. Full of great ways for others to improve without any expense to themselves. There’s an ego thing in there, too. They use the morals to make someone else look inferior and that way look better themselves. It doesn’t matter what the moral code is — religious morals, political morals, racist morals, capitalist morals, feminist morals, hippie morals — they’re all the same. The moral codes change but the meanness and the egotism stay the same.

The trouble was, pure meanness didn’t completely explain what happened this morning. Something else was going on. Why should Rigel be so concerned about morals at that early hour in the morning? It just didn’t scan right… Not for some yachtsman-lawyer like that. Not in this century anyway. Maybe back in 1880 some church deacon lawyer might have talked like that but not now. All that stuff Rigel was referring to about sacred duties and home and family went out fifty years ago. That wasn’t what Rigel was mad about. It didn’t make sense for him to go running around sermonizing people on morals… at eight o’clock in the morning… on his vacation, for God’s sake.

It wasn’t even Sunday.

It was just bizarre…

He was mad about something else. What he was trying to do was catch Phædrus in the old trap of sexual morality. If Phædrus answered that Lila had Quality then he would be saying sex was Quality which was not right. But if he said Lila had no Quality the next question was, Why were you sleeping with her? That had to be the world’s oldest guilt trap. If you didn’t go for Lila you’re some kind of prissy old prude. If you did go for her you were some kind of dirty old man. No matter what you did you were guilty and should be ashamed of yourself. That trap’s been around since the Garden of Eden, at least.

A broad lawn rising back from the bluff above the water’s edge led to a grove of trees that partly concealed a large Victorian fin de siécle mansion. The lawn had the same deserted look he’d seen yesterday — uninhabited. No children or animals played anywhere.

He noticed again, as he had coming down here, how this old Hudson River valley looked like paintings of it made more than a hundred years ago. The banks of the river were steep and heavily forested, giving the river a quiet and tranquil look. Things seemed to have been the same here for a long time. Since he’d entered the Erie Canal system he’d noticed how things seemed older and more tired. Now that feeling was even more dominant.

Hundreds of years ago these old waterways were the only way to travel in this continent. For a while he had wondered why his boat always seemed to stop in the oldest part of each city it came to, and then he realized that small boats stopping right there is what got the city started in the first place.

Now there’s a sadness that attaches to these old river and lake ports that were once bustling and important. Before the railroads took over, this Hudson River and Erie Canal system were the main shipping route to the Great Lakes and the West. Now there’s almost nothing, just an occasional oil barge. The river is almost abandoned.

A depression always came over him when he came East like this, but the oldness and abandonment weren’t the only reasons for it. He was a Midwesterner and he shared the prejudices of many Midwesterners against this region of the country. He didn’t like the way everything gets more stratified here. The rich start looking richer and the poor start looking poorer. What was worse, they looked as though they thought this was the way things ought to be. They had settled for this. There was no sign it was going to change.

In a state like Minnesota or Wisconsin you can be poor and still feel some sense of dignity if you work hard and live fairly cleanly and you keep your eye on the future. But here in New York it seemed as if when you’re poor you’re just poor. And that means you’re nobody. Really nobody. And if you’re rich you’re really somebody. And that fact seemed to explain 95 per cent of everything else that went on in this region.

Maybe he was just noticing it more because he’d been thinking about Indians. Some of these differences are just urban-rural differences, and the East is more urban. But some of these differences reflected European values too. Every time he came this way he could feel the people getting more formal and impersonal and… crafty. Exploitative. European. And petty too, and ungenerous.

Out West among the Indians it’s a standing joke that the chief is the poorest man in the tribe. Every time somebody needs something he’s the one they go to, and by the Indian code, the generosity of the frontier, he has to help them. Phædrus didn’t think you’d see much of that along this river. He could just imagine some strange riverboat man pulling up at Astor’s mansion and saying, I just saw a light on and thought I’d stop in and say "hello". He wouldn’t get past the butler. They’d be horrified at his impertinence. Yet in the West they’d probably feel obliged to invite him in.