Word: phaedrus
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...BOOKS Phaedrus has traded in his motorcycle for a boat...
...been 17 years since Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance went vroom-vroom into bookstores, and it has not stopped selling since. Millions of readers have followed Phaedrus, Robert M. Pirsig's enigmatic narrator-hero, on his physical journey through the American West and his inner trip toward a mystical understanding of the universe. Although it appeared in 1974, Zen was and remains one of the most impressive literary expressions of the countercultural...
...Phaedrus is back in Lila, Pirsig's second book, this time alone on a boat, wending his way leisurely down a water path that originated in Lake Superior and may bring him to Florida or even Mexico. He had hoped that all this free, undisturbed time would allow him to sort through the thousands of note cards he has assembled for his next book, tentatively titled Metaphysics of Quality or Metaphysics of Value. And this book, as Phaedrus describes it, sounds interesting: an attempt to find some middle path between scientists and mystics, between those who swear by facts alone...
...turned in the manuscript for a follow-up that could reach booksellers by autumn. His publisher, Morrow, has gambled an estimated $2.3 million advance that many of the readers touched by the first work would rush to buy the second. In Lila, Pirsig chronicles a journey undertaken by Phaedrus, whom readers may recognize as Pirsig's alter ego in the earlier book. Phaedrus meets Lila in a bar and takes a sailboat ride with her up the Hudson River. Pirsig's agent describes the journey as a search for the "metaphysics of quality...
This ghostly Pirsig-past continues to haunt Pirsig-present as well as his son. There is a climactic moment when Pirsig thinks that he is again losing his grip and that Phaedrus may regain control. He decides to send the boy home by bus and check into a hospital. The boy refuses to go and begins to weep uncontrollably. Then, for the first time, father and son confront the painful truth about Phaedrus. The past and present come together, and Pirsig and Chris, who up to this point have seemed like subject and object, are united by what might...