Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

On the third day he turns a corner at an intersection of unknown streets and his vision blanks out. When it returns he is lying on the sidewalk, people moving around him as if he were not there. He gets up wearily and mercilessly drives his thoughts to remember the way back to the apartment. They are slowing down. Slowing down. This is about the time he and Chris try to find the sellers of bunk beds for the children to sleep in. After that he does not leave the apartment.

He stares at the wall in a cross-legged position upon a quilted blanket on the floor of a bedless bedroom. All bridges have been burned. There is no way back. And now there is no way forward either.

For three days and three nights, Phædrus stares at the wall of the bedroom, his thoughts moving neither forward nor backward, staying only at the instant. His wife asks if he is sick, and he does not answer. His wife becomes angry, but Phædrus listens without responding. He is aware of what she says but is no longer able to feel any urgency about it. Not only are his thoughts slowing down, but his desires too. And they slow and slow, as if gaining an imponderable mass. So heavy, so tired, but no sleep comes. He feels like a giant, a million miles tall. He feels himself extending into the universe with no limit.

He begins to discard things, encumbrances that he has carried with him all his life. He tells his wife to leave with the children, to consider themselves separated. Fear of loathsomeness and shame disappear when his urine flows not deliberately but naturally on the floor of the room. Fear of pain, the pain of the martyrs is overcome when cigarettes burn not deliberately but naturally down into his fingers until they are extinguished by blisters formed by their own heat. His wife sees his injured hands and the urine on the floor and calls for help.

But before help comes, slowly, imperceptibly at first, the entire consciousness of Phædrus begins to come apart — to dissolve and fade away. Then gradually he no longer wonders what will happen next. He knows what will happen next, and tears flow for his family and for himself and for this world. A fragment comes and lingers from an old Christian hymn, “You’ve got to cross that lonesome valley.” It carries him forward. “You’ve got to cross it by yourself.” It seems a Western hymn that belongs out in Montana.

“No one else can cross it for you”, it says. It seems to suggest something beyond. “You’ve got to cross it by yourself.”

He crosses a lonesome valley, out of the mythos, and emerges as if from a dream, seeing that his whole consciousness, the mythos, has been a dream and no one’s dream but his own, a dream he must now sustain of his own efforts. Then even “he” disappears and only the dream of himself remains with himself in it.

And the Quality, the arete he has fought so hard for, has sacrificed for, has never betrayed, but in all that time has never once understood, now makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest.

The cars are thinned out to almost none, and the road is so black it seems as though the headlight can barely fight its way through the rain to reach it. Murderous. Anything can happen… a sudden rut, an oil slick, a dead animal. — But if you go too slow they’ll kill you from behind. I don’t know why we still go on in this. We should have stopped long ago. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I was looking for some sign of a motel, I guess, but not thinking about it and missing them. If we keep on like this they’ll all close.

We take the next exit from the freeway, hoping it will lead somewhere, and soon are on bumpy blacktop with ruts and loose gravel. I go slowly. Streetlamps overhead throw swinging arcs of sodium light through the sheets of rain. We pass from light into shadow into light into shadow again without a single sign of welcome anywhere. A sign announces “STOP” to our left, but does not tell which way to turn. One way looks as dark as the other. We could go endlessly through these streets and not find anything, and now not even find the freeway again.

“Where are we?” Chris shouts.

“I don’t know.” My mind has become tired and slow. I can’t seem to think of the right answer — or what to do next.

Now I see ahead a white glow and bright sign of a filling station far down the street.

It’s open. We pull up and go inside. The attendant, who looks Chris’s age, watches us strangely. He doesn’t know of any motel. I go to the telephone directory, find some and tell him the street addresses, and he tries to give directions but they’re poor. I call the motel he says is closest, make a reservation and confirm the directions.

In the rain and the dark streets, even with directions, we almost miss it. They have turned the light out, and when I register nothing is said.

The room is a remnant of the bleakness of the thirties, sordid, homemade by a person who didn’t know carpentry, but it’s dry and has a heater and beds and that’s all we want. I turn on the heater and we sit before it and soon the chills and shivers and damp start to leave our bones.

Chris doesn’t look up, just stares into the grille of the wall heater. Then, after a while, he says, “When are we going back home?”

Failure.

“When we get to San Francisco”, I say. “Why?”

“I’m so tired of just sitting and — ” His voice has trailed off.

“And what?”

“And — I don’t know. Just sitting — like we’re not really going anyplace.”

“Where should we go?”

“I don’t know. How should I know?”

“I don’t know either”, I say.

“Well, why don’t you!” he says. He begins to cry.

He doesn’t answer. Then he puts his head in his hands and rocks back and forth. The way he does it gives me an eerie feeling. After a while he stops and says, “When I was little it was different.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. We always did things. That I wanted to do. Now I don’t want to do anything.”

He continues to rock back and forth in that eerie way, with his face in his hands, and I don’t know what to do. It’s a strange, unworldly rocking motion, a fetal self-enclosure that seems to shut me out, to shut everything out. A return to somewhere that I don’t know about — the bottom of the ocean.

Now I know where I have seen it before, on the floor of the hospital.

I don’t know of anything to do.

After a while we get in our beds and I try to sleep.

Then I ask Chris, “Was it better before we left Chicago?”

“Yes.”

“How? What do you remember?”

“That was fun.”

“Fun?”

“Yes”, he says, and is quiet. Then he says, “Remember the time we went to look for beds?”

“That was fun?”

“Sure”, he says, and is quiet for a long time. Then he says, “Don’t you remember? You made me find all the directions home. — You used to play games with us. You used to tell us all kinds of stories and we’d go on rides to do things and now you don’t do anything.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t! You just sit and stare and you don’t do anything!” I hear him crying again.

Outside the rain comes in gusts against the window, and I feel a kind of heavy pressure bear down on me. He’s crying for him. It’s him he misses. That’s what the dream is about. In the dream. —

For what seems like a long time I continue to listen to the cricking sound of the wall heater and the wind and the rain against the roof and window. Then the rain dies away and there is nothing left but a few drops of water from the trees moving in an occasional gust of wind.

In the morning I am stopped by the appearence of a green slug on the ground. It’s about six inches long, three-quarters inch wide and soft and almost rubbery and covered with slime like some internal organ of an animal.