About the Author
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Robert Pirsig was born in 1928 in Minneapolis,
Minnesota. He held degrees in chemistry, philosophy, and
journalism and also studied at Benares Hindu University in India.
He was the author of the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance and its sequel, Lila. He died in 2017.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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1.
Lila didn’t know he was here. She was sound asleep, apparently
in some fearful dream. In the darkness he heard a grating sound
of her teeth and felt her body suddenly turn as she struggled
against some menace only she could see.
The light from the open hatch above was so dim it concealed
whatever lines of cosmetics and age were there and now she looked
softly cherubic, like a small girl with blond hair, wide
cheekbones, a small turned-up nose, and a common child’s face
that seemed so familiar it attracted a certain natural affection.
He got the feeling that when morning came she should pop open her
sky-blue eyes and they should sparkle with excitement at the
prospect of a new day of sunlight and parents smiling and maybe
bacon cooking on the stove and happiness everywhere.
But that wasn’t how it would be. When Lila’s eyes opened in a
hung-over daze she’d look into the features of a gray-haired man
she wouldn’t even remember—someone she met in a bar the previous
night. Her nausea and headache might produce some remorse and
self-contempt but not much, he thought—she’d been through this
many times—and she’d slowly try to figure out how to return to
whatever life she’d been leading before she met this one.
Her voice murmured something like “Look out!” Then she said
something unintelligible and turned away, then pulled the blanket
up around her head, perhaps against the cold breeze that came
down through the open hatch. The berth of the sailboat was so
narrow that this turn of her body brought her up against him
again and he felt the whole length of her and then her warmth. An
earlier lust came back and his arm went over her so that his hand
held her breast—full there but too soft, like something overripe
that would soon go bad.
He wanted to wake her and take her again but as he thought about
this a sad feeling rose up and forbade it. The more he hesitated
the more the sadness grew. He would like to know her better. He’d
had a feeling all night that he had seen her before somewhere, a
long time ago.
That thought seemed to bring it all down. Now the sadness came
on in full and blended with the darkness of the cabin and with
the dim indigo light through the hatch above. Up there were
stars, framed by the hatch opening so that they seemed to move
when the boat rocked. Part of Orion momentarily disappeared, then
appeared again. Soon all the winter constellations would be back.
Cars rolling over a bridge in the distance sounded clearly
through the cold night air. They were on their way to Kingston,
somewhere on the bluffs above, over the Hudson River. The boat
was berthed here in this tiny creek for a night’s rest on the way
south.
There was not much time. There was almost no green left in the
trees along the river. Many of the turned leaves had already
fallen. During these last few days, gusts of cold wind had swept
down the river valley from the north, swirling the leaves up off
their branches into the air in sudden spiraling flights of red
and maroon and gold and brown across the water of the river into
the path of the boat as it moved down the buoyed channel. There
had been hardly any other boats in the channel. A few boats at
docks along the riverbank seemed abandoned and forlorn now that
summer had ended and their owners had turned to other pursuits.
Overhead the V’s of ducks and geese had been everywhere, flying
down on the north wind from the Canadian arctic. Many of them
must have been just ducklings and goslings when he first began
this voyage from the inland ocean of Lake Superior, a thousand
miles behind him now and what seemed like a thousand years ago.
There was not much time. Yesterday when he first went up on deck
his foot slipped and he caught himself and then he saw the entire
boat was covered with ice.
Phædrus wondered where he had seen Lila before, but he didn’t
know. It seemed as though he had seen her, though. It was autumn
then too, he thought, November, and it was very cold. He
remembered the streetcar was almost empty except for him and the
motorman and the conductor and Lila and her girlfriend sitting
back three seats behind him. The seats were yellow woven rattan,
hard and tough, designed for years of wear, and then a few years
later the buses replaced them and the tracks and overhead cables
and the streetcars were all gone.
He remembered he had seen three movies in a row and smoked too
many cigarettes and had a bad headache and it was still about
half an hour of pounding along the tracks before the streetcar
would let him off and then he would have a block and a half
through the dark to get home where there would be some aspirin
and it would be about an hour and a half after that before the
headache would go away. Then he heard these two girls giggle very
loudly and he turned to see what it was. They stopped very
suddenly and they looked at him in such a way that there could
have been only one thing they were giggling at. It was him. He
had a big nose and poor posture and wasn’t anything to look at,
and tended to relate poorly to other people. The one on the left
who looked like she had been giggling the loudest was Lila. The
same face, exactly—gold hair and smooth complexion and blue
eyes—with a smothered smile she probably thought covered up what
she was laughing at. They got off a couple of blocks later, still
talking and laughing.
A few months later he saw her again in a downtown rush-hour
crowd. It happened in a moment and then it was over. She turned
her head and he saw in her face that she recognized him and she
seemed to pause, waiting for him to do something, say something.
But he didn’t act. He didn’t have that skill of relating quickly
to people, and then it was too late, somehow, and they each went
on and he wondered for a long time that afternoon, and for days
after that, who she was and what it would have been like if he
had gone over and said something. The next summer he thought he
saw her at a bathing beach in the south part of the city. She was
lying in the sand so that when he walked past her he saw her face
upside down and he was suddenly very excited. This time he
wouldn’t just stand there. This time he would act, and he worked
up his courage and went back and stood in the sand at her feet
and then saw that the right-side-up face wasn’t Lila. It was
someone else. He remembered how sad that was. He didn’t have
anybody in those days.
But that was so long ago—years and years ago. She would have
changed. There was no chance that this was the same person. And
he didn’t know her anyway. What difference did it make? Why
should he remember such an insignificant incident like that all
these years?
These half-forgotten images are strange, he thought, like
dreams. This sleeping Lila whom he had just met tonight was
someone else too. Or not someone else exactly, but someone less
specific, less individual. There is Lila, this single private
person who slept beside him now, who was born and now lived and
tossed in her dreams and will soon enough die and then there is
someone else—call her lila—who is immortal, who inhabits Lila for
a while and then moves on. The sleeping Lila he had just met
tonight. But the waking Lila, who never sleeps, had been watching
him and he had been watching her for a long time.
It was so strange. All the time he had been coming down the
canal through lock after lock she had been making the same
journey but he didn’t know she was there. Maybe he had seen her
in the locks at Troy, looked right at her in the dark but had not
seen her. His chart had shown a series of locks close together
but they didn’t show altitude and they didn’t show how confusing
things could get when distances have been miscalculated and you
are running late and are exhausted. It wasn’t until he was
actually in the locks that danger was apparent as he tried to
sort out green lights and red lights and white lights and lights
of locktenders’ houses and lights of other boats coming the other
way and lights of bridges and abutments and God knows what else
was out there in that black that he didn’t want to hit in the
middle of the darkness or go aground either. He’d never seen them
before and it was a tense experience, and it was amidst all this
tension that he seemed to remember seeing her on another boat.
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