“No one that he knew had ever written a whole metaphysics before”: Phaedrus
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- “Narrow it down to … the upper left-hand brick”: Phaedrus
- “No one that he knew had ever written a whole metaphysics before”: Phaedrus
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He saw that her suitcase had shoved all his trays of slips over to one side of the pilot berth. They were for a book he was working on and the one of the four long card-catalog-type trays was by an edge where it could fall off. …
The reason Phaedrus used slips rather than full-sized sheets of paper is that a card-catalog tray full of slips provides a more random access. … Some of the slips were actually about this topic: random access and Quality. The two are closely related. Random access is a the essence of organic growth …
Before long he noticed certain categories emerging. The earlier slips began to merge about a common topic and later slips about a different topic. …
In was fascinating to watch this thing grow. No one that he knew had ever written a whole metaphysics before and there were no rules for doing it and no way of predicting how it would progress.
Pirsig, Robert M. (1991). Lila. NY: Bantam. Pgs. 23-25.
Several years ago, I made a book attempt using Phaedrus’ method to sort my ideas. Pirsig is a great reader, thinker and writer. He clearly was fond of innovating with writing tools. I wonder what he would think of tagging, wikis and so forth. I am intentionally using my blog as a wiki to develop a book idea. I use categories and tags and WordPress plugins to organize the ideas. I was thinking of Phaedrus’ card catalogue when I started blogging in this way.
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