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„But if this were all there were to him, analytic skill, I would be more than willing to shut up about him. What makes it important not to shut up about him was that he used this skill in such a bizarre and yet meaningful way. No one ever saw this, I don’t think he even saw it himself, and it may be an illusion of my own, but the knife (the intellect; Anm. d. Sammlers) he used was less that of an assassin than that of a poor surgeon. Perhaps there is no difference. But he saw a sick and ailing thing happening and he started to cut deeper, deeper and deeper to get at the root of it. He was after something and he used the knife because that was the only tool he had. But he took on so much and went so far in the end his real victim was himself.“
(R.M. Pirsig, „Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“)

Mittlerweile bin ich verwirrt genug, so dass es sogar mein Ego schwer hat, den Überblick zu behalten.

„I feel happy to be here, and still a little sad to be here, too. Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.“
(R.M. Pirsig, „Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“)

Zurzeit fühle ich mich gleichzeitig schwerer, aber auch leichter irgendwie als sonst. Aber beides ist okay in der Art und Weise, dass ich mich gleichsam geerdet als wie befreit wahrnehme. – Ich glaube, das ist vollkommen neu in meinem Leben.

„To all appearance he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting. Drifting is what one does when looking at lateral truth (that is, knowledge which comes out of nowhere, that ’forces itself upon you‘; Anm. d. Sammlers). He couldn’t follow any known method of procedure to uncover its cause because it was these methods and procedures that were all screwed up in the first place. So he drifted. That was all he could do.“
(R.M. Pirsig, „Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“)

Warum gibt es Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzungen, wenn alles Eins ist?
(Spiritualität auf Messers Schneide)

„They just explode with emotion. He writes page after page about tiny details of things he sees: marketplaces, shops with sliding glass doors, slate roofs, roads, thatched huts, everything. Sometimes full of wild enthusiasm, sometimes depressed, sometimes angry, sometimes even humorous, he is like someone or some creature that has found an exit from a cage he did not even know was around him, and is wildly roaming over the countryside visually devouring everything in sight.“
(R.M. Pirsig, „Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“)

Bis zu diesem Zeitpunkt war das die Reise, während der ich vor allem mit anderen Menschen und am wenigsten mit mir selbst zusammen war.
Ich finde, dafür stehe ich noch ganz gut da.

„Cromwell’s statement, ’No one ever travels so high as he who knows not where he is going,’ applied at this point. He didn’t know where he was going. All he knew was that it worked.“
(R.M. Pirsig, „Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“)

„When you’ve got a Chautauqua (some kind of lecture-essays in the native American tradition; Anm. d. Sammlers) in your head, it’s extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.“
(R.M. Pirsig, „Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“)

Ein von der Morgensonne beschienener Urinstrahl sieht aus wie ein golden knisternder Regen.

„The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn’t the way it ever is. People should see that it’s never anything other than just the person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It’s never been anything else, ever, but you can’t get that across in an essay.“
(R.M. Pirsig, „Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“)

Hat jemand ein Feuerzeug?

„It made the kids at camp much more enthusiastic and cooperative when they had ego goals to fulfil, I’m sure, but ultimately that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self-glorification at its final end point is bound to end in disaster. Now we’re paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it’s a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to proof yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That’s never the way.
(…)
To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breath in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He’s likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he’s tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be here. What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.“
(R.M. Pirsig, „Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“)

Von Wanderinen und Kaminchen.

„But that’s always the way, it don’t make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person’s conscience ain’t got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. (…) It takes up more room than all the rest of a person’s insides, and yet ain’t no good, nohow.“
(M. Twain, „The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn“)

Was ist denn mit Karsten los?

„This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It’s a miserable experience emotionally. You’re losing time. You’re incompetent. You don’t know what you’re doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take the machine to a real mechanic who knows how to figure these things out.
It’s normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge if necessary. You think about it, and the more you think about it the more you’re inclined to take the whole machine to a high bridge and drop it off. (…)
What you’re up against ist the great unknown, the void of all Western thought. You need some ideas, some hypotheses. Traditional scientific method, unfortunately, has never quite gotten around to say exactly where to pick up more of these hypotheses. (…) It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past, creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination – ’unstuckness,‘ in other words – are completely outside its domain.“
(R.M. Pirsig, „Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“)

„Waaann kommt die Zeit wieder zurüück?“
(Inja, Petras Sohn)

„Ihr gebt nur wenig, wenn ihr von eurer Habe gebt.
Wahrhaft gebt ihr erst, wenn ihr von euch gebt.
(…)
Und was ist Furcht vor Not denn anderes als Not?
Ist nicht die Angst vor Durst, wenn euer Brunnen voll ist, erst der Durst, den nichts je löschen kann?
(…)
Menschen gibt es, die voller Freude geben, und diese Freude ist ihr Lohn.
Und es gibt Menschen, die unter Schmerzen geben, und dieser Schmerz ist ihre Läuterung.
Und Menschen gibt’s, die geben und nichts vom Schmerz des Gebens wissen noch nach Freude streben noch um der Tugend willen;
Sie geben so, wie die Myrte im Tal dort drüben atmend ihren Duft verbreitet.
Durch solcher Menschen Hand spricht Gott, und aus ihren Augen lächelt Er nieder auf die Welt.“
(K. Gibran, „Der Prophet“)

Wer tippselt so schräg durch Nacht und Wind?
Der Dichter ists, mit seinem Kind.
Beim stillen Zirpen der Zikade
Klärt ihm sich so manche Frage

Nach Reim und Sinnlichkeit geheim;
Nichts darf ewiglich verschlossen blei’m.
Muss schon in den Äther unsrer Welt!
Ein wüster Ling, der es all
Für sich behält.

„Ich aber sage euch: Wenn ihr arbeitet, erfüllt ihr einen Teil des kühnsten Traums der Erde, der euch anvertraut wurde, als dieser Traum entstand,
Und indem ihr euch Mühsalen unterzieht, erweist ihr dem Leben eure Liebe,
(…)
Und was bedeutet, mit Liebe zu arbeiten?
Es bedeutet, den Stoff aus Fäden zu weben, die ihr euren Herzen entspinnt, gerade so, als wäre der Stoff für euren Geliebten zum Tragen bestimmt.
(…)
Es bedeutet, jedem Ding, das ihr schafft, etwas von eurem Geist einzuhauchen,
(…)
Arbeit ist sichtbar gewordene Liebe.“
(K. Gibran, „Der Prophet“)

„A little thing like that don’t cost nothing, and it’s just the little things that makes a man to be looked up to and liked. There warn’t no more popular men in town than what that undertaker was.“
(M. Twain, „The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn“)

„This was the beginning of the crystallization that I talked about before. Others wondered at the time, ’Why should he get so excited about ’quality‘? But they saw only the word and its rhetoric context. They didn’t see his past despair over abstract questions of existence itself that he had abandoned in defeat.
If anyone else had asked, ’What is Quality?’ it would have been just another question. But when he asked it, because of his past, it spread out for him like waves in all directions simultaneously, not in a hierarchic structure, but in a concentric one. At the center, generating the waves, was Quality. As these waves of thought expanded for him I’m sure he fully expected each wave to reach some shore of existing patterns of thought so that he had a kind of unified relationship with these thought structures. But the shore was never reached until the end, if it appeared at all. For him there was nothing but ever expanding waves of crystallization.“
(R.M. Pirsig, „Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“)