Robert Pirsig - Lila. An Inquiry Into Morals

He wondered why she picked him up, of all people, at that bar.

She must see him as some sort of refuge. Some sort of savior.

He began to think about how isolated she really was.

After a while he guessed that must be the whole explanation. That’s why she came back here tonight. Apparently he was the only person she could come to.

He didn’t know what he was going to do with her.

Just listen to her for a while, he supposed, and then figure it out. That’s all he could do.

The absence of any harbor sounds here was strange. Here in New York Harbor he’d expected tugboats and barges going through the night and heavy ocean vessels. Not this. This was like some peaceful inland lake somewhere…

Sleep didn’t come… That light he saw around her. It was trying to tell him something.

It was saying, wake up.

But wake up to what?

Wake up to your obligations, maybe.

What were they?

Maybe not to be so static.

It was a long time now since those years when Phædrus had been a mental patient. He’d become very static. He was more intelligible to the sane now because he’d moved closer to them. But he’d become a lot farther away from people like Lila.

Now he saw her the same way others had seen him years ago. And now he was behaving exactly the way they did. They could be excused for not knowing better. They didn’t know what it was like. But he didn’t have that excuse.

It’s a legitimate point of view. It’s the lifeboat problem. If you get too involved with too many people with too many problems they drag you under. You don’t save them. They sink you.

Of course she’s unimportant. Of course she’s a waste of time. She’s causing an interruption of other more important purposes in life. No one admits it, but that’s really the reason the insane get locked up. They’re disgusting people you want to get rid of but can’t. It’s not just that they have absurd ideas that nobody else believes. What makes them insane is that they have these ideas and are a nuisance to somebody else.

The only thing that’s illegitimate is the cover-up, the pretense that you’re trying to help them by getting rid of them. But really there was no way Lila was going to sink him. She was just a nuisance now, and he could handle that. Maybe that’s what the light was trying to tell him. He had no choice but to try to help her, nuisance or not. Otherwise he would just injure himself. You can’t just run off from other people without injuring yourself too.

Well, he thought… she’s either come to the best possible person or to the worst possible person. No way yet to know which.

He rolled over and lay quietly.

He knew he had heard that talk of hers before, that style, and now he remembered some of the people he had talked to in the insane asylum. When people are going insane they tend to get very ingenuous like that… What did he remember? It all seemed so long ago.

Aunt Ellen. When he was seven.

There was a noise in the downstairs in the dark. His parents thought it was a burglar, but it was Ellen. Her eyes were wide. Some man was chasing her, she said. He was trying to hypnotize her and do things to her.

Later, at the asylum Phædrus remembered her pleading, I’m all right. I’m all right! They’re just keeping me here when I know I’m all right.

Afterward his mother and her sisters had cried as they left. But they didn’t see what he saw.

He never forgot what he saw, that Ellen wasn’t frightened of the insanity. She was frightened of them.

That was the hardest thing to deal with during his own commitment. Not the insanity. That came naturally. The hardest thing to deal with was the righteousness of the sane.

When you’re in agreement with the sane they’re a great comfort and protection, but when you disagree with them it’s another matter. Then they’re dangerous. Then they’ll do anything. The sinister thing that struck the most fear in him was what they’d do in the name of kindness. The ones he cared about most and who cared about him most suddenly, all of them, turned against him the same way they had against Ellen. They kept saying, There’s no way we can reach you. If only we could make you understand.

He saw that the sane always know they are good because their culture tells them so. Anyone who tells them otherwise is sick, paranoid, and needs further treatment. To avoid that accusation Phædrus had had to be very careful of what he said when he was in the hospital. He told the sane what they wanted to hear and kept his real thoughts to himself.

He turned back again. This pillow was like a rock. She had all the good pillows up there. No way to get one now… It didn’t matter.

That was what was wrong with making a film about his book. You can’t film insanity.

Maybe if, during the show, the whole theater collapsed and the audience found themselves among the stars with just space all around and no support, wondering what a stupid thing this is, sitting here among the stars watching this film that has nothing to do with them and then suddenly realizing that this film is the only reality there is and that they had better get interested in it because what they see and what they are is the same thing and once it stops they will stop too…

That’s it. Everything! Gone!!

Nothing left!!

And then after a while this dream of some kind going on, and them in it.

That’s the way it was. He’d gotten so used to being in this dream called sanity he hardly ever thought about it any more. Just once in a while, when something like this reminded him of it. Now he could see the light just rarely, once in a while, like tonight. But back then the light had been everything.

It wasn’t that any particular thing looked different. It was that the whole context of everything was completely different although it contained the same things.

He remembered a metaphor that had occurred to him of a bug that had been crawling around in some smelly sock all his life and now someone or something had turned the sock inside out. The terrain he covered, the details of his life, were all the same, but now somehow everything seemed open and free and all the horrible confining smell of everything was gone.

Another metaphor that had occurred to him was that he’d been on a tight-rope all of his life. Now he’d fallen off and found that instead of crashing he was flying, a strange new talent he never knew he had.

He remembered how he kept to himself the feeling of exhilaration, of old mysteries being solved and new mysteries being explored. He remembered how it seemed to him that he hadn’t entered any cataleptic trance. He had fallen out of one. He was free of a static pattern of life he’d thought was unchangeable.

The boat rocked a little and he became aware again of where he was. Crazy. He was going to be insane again if he didn’t get some sleep. Too much chaos… streets, noises, people he hadn’t seen for more than a year, Robert Redford, suddenly juxtaposed against all this boat background… and now this Lila business on top of it all. Too much… It all keeps changing, changing, changing. He’d wanted not to get stuck in some static pattern, but this was too fluid. There ought to be some halfway mixture of chaos and stability. He was getting too old for all this.

Maybe he should read for a while. Here he was, at a dock, all plugged into 120-volt power for the first time in weeks and he hadn’t enjoyed it once. He could read all the new mail. That would calm him down, maybe.

After a while he got up, got the 120-volt reading lamp out of its bin, plugged it in and switched it. It didn’t work. Probably the power line was disconnected at the dock. That always seemed to happen. It was cold in here too. He would have to get the fire going again.