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“Narrow it down to … the upper left-hand brick”: Phaedrus

1 November 2009 No Comment
This entry is part 18 of 45 in the series I, Reader

When the paper came due she didn’t have it and was quite upset. She has tried and tried, but she couldn’t think of anything to say. …

“You’re not looking!” he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn’t looking and yet somehow didn’t understand this.

He told her angrily, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”

Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide.

She in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana.

Pirsig, Robert, M. (1999). Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: An inquiry into values. NY: Harper Perennial. Page 191.

Series Navigation«What Readers Write May Not Be Literature, But It Might Become So“No one that he knew had ever written a whole metaphysics before”: Phaedrus»

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