There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way.
Degeneracy can be fun but it’s hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.
Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating. Angering. Infuriating. That’s what makes it interesting.
It’s an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it’s done and the talk about how it’s done never seems to match how one does it.
An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results.
The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in.
Just a sort of unexplained sadness that comes each afternoon when the new day is gone forever and there’s nothing ahead but increasing darkness.
He wasn’t going to send her to any hospital. He knew that now. At a hospital they’d just start shooting her full of drugs and tell her to adjust. What they wouldn’t see is that she is adjusting. That’s what the insanity is. She’s adjusting to something. The insanity is the adjustment. Insanity isn’t necessarily a step in the wrong direction, it can be an intermediate step in a right direction. It wasn’t necessarily a disease. It could be part of a cure.
To the ocean. That sounds right. Where the waves roll in slowly and there’s always a roar and you can’t fall anywhere. You’re already there.
I am a pioneer now, looking onto a promised land.
It’s all taking the customer’s money and giving him exactly what he wants and then leaving him poorer than when he started.
Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland people – what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest levels of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean and the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be so stopped by the mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all.
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire.
To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting. Drifting is what one does when looking at lateral truth.
Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.
I make some jokes about it, but they’re not funny and just add to the depression.
The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. “Art” when it is opposed to “Science” is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience.
Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything.
The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws – which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior.