Hi Roger, Mark and all,
I work close to home - a distance of almost 2 miles. I usually choose to
walk home for 3 reasons:
1. My wife has the car
2. The traffic is such that driving wouldn't save much time
3. The exercise is good for me
It's not really a pleasant walk in any objective sense. I walk along the
main road into Rehovot, more-or-less keeping up with the cars and buses
as they funnel into the bottleneck that serves as the entrance to the
town. I also often share the path with dozens of passengers who emerge
from the railway station as I pass.
However, this walk is 30 minutes of the day that I've really come to
enjoy. I inevitably get around to thinking about what has been said in
the MoQ lists, and as I walk, my thoughts tend to crystallize to an
amazing degree of clarity. Sometimes a small part of that clarity
remains until I get around to putting my thoughts into an e-mail
message. Just as often though, the clarity simply evaporates like a
dream and I can't understand why I was feeling slightly euphoric during
my walk.
The theme of today's walk was Roger's CHOICE post, that I liked.
What I didn't like was Mark's comment:
MARK
>But imo the Choice villain is still at large dodging the
>"slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". The search
>continues...
This isn't to be a critique on either post - you can't read a post while
walking!
Rather, it is the product of my own rambling thoughts. What I realized
is that CHOICE is central to the whole concept of QUALITY. If you can't
choose between low quality and high quality, then quality ceases to mean
anything at all. Choice is the affirmation of quality.
However, my bigger insight was that we value choice itself. When we ask,
"Why did Pirsig choose that particular example?" we are attaching value
to Pirsig's choice. It means a whole lot more than the winning lottery
number the computer "chose" this week! Choice is the dynamic side of
quality. The options available are the static side.
As a spinoff, I thought about Phaedrus's CHOOSING Lila as his companion,
and the significance of the central question "Does Lila have Quality?" -
only at home do I see that Roger also stated this question in his post.
The funny thing is that in my mind, I had phrased the question "Does
Lila have VALUE?" which allows a slightly new twist. When Rigel posed
his question, he wasn't really interested in Lila, but in Phaedrus! What
he was really asking was "Do you, Phaedrus, have any values?" - in other
words "Are you a moral person?".
In terms of Rigal's question, Lila's value is objective quality, while
Phaedrus' values are subjective quality.
IMO both aspects fail to capture the dynamics between Phaedrus and Lila.
That SO knife destroys quality almost completely - no wonder Phaedrus of
ZAMM had to be so careful.
The dynamics between two people is interesting, especially in its
special high quality form that we call love.
Let's leave Phaedrus and Lila behind, because they don't impress me as
true lovers, and consider instead Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and
Cleopatra, David and Batsheva or any other of history's legendary
lovers.
The quality of these loves was so extreme that the memory has carried
forward for many generations.
What is it that makes love so valuable?
I am reminded of Tom Hanks is "Sleepless in Seattle" trying to tell a
radio host about all the things that made his late wife so special. A
man
who truly loves a woman - in a thousand different ways - now that's
what I call dynamic quality.
I wish I could write better and capture the amazing clarity I felt as
these thoughts swept over me. The way it looks written on the screen
falls far short, but alas, this is all I have to share.
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:03:26 BST