Dedication to a friend
Submitted by
emiab on Fri, 06/27/2008 at 10:31am.
Hot, too hot here for real chess thoughts. So I'm thinking to let chess be by itself for a while, after all,it has survived centuries without me having to do anything with it. So , lol, if chess can survive without emiab, than emiab can survive 1/2 h without thinking or doing anything about chess.
I want to just throw a glance on writing. Please forgive me if it's going to be long .
It isn't mine either, so that's what the quatation marks are for .
" Today now I want to take up the first phase of his journey to Quality, the nonmethaphisical phase and this will be pleasant. It's nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won't end that way. Using his class notes as reference material I want to reconstruct the way in which Quality became a working concept for him in the teaching of rhetoric. His second phase, the metaphysical one, was tenuous and speculative, but this first phase, in which he simply taught rhetoric, was by all accounts solid and pragmatic and probably deserves to be judged on its own merits, independently of the second phase.
He'd been innovating extensively. He'd been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn't. They couldn't think of anything to say.
One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five- hundred -word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it to just Bozeman.
When the paper came due she didn't have it and was quite upset.She had tried and tried but she just couldn't think of anything to say.
He had already discussed her with her previous instructors and they'd confirmed his impressions of her.She was very serious, disciplined and hardworking, but extremely dull.Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere. Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, were the eyes of a drudge. She wasn't bluffing him, she really coudn't think of anything to say and was upset by her inability to do as she was told.
It just stumped him. Now, he couldn't think of anything to say.A silence occured and then a peculiar answer:"Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman".It was a stroke of insight.
She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn't think of anything to say, and couldn't understand why, if she couldn't think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.
He was furious. " 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 brick." Her eyes , behind the thick-lensed glasses opened wide.
She came 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. "I sat at the hamburger stand across the street", she said, "and started writing about the first brick and then the second brick and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop. They thought I was crazy and they kept kidding me but here it all is. (...)she was blocked because she was trying to repeat , in her writing, things she had already heard . (...) She couldn't think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn't recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself as she wrote without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing ". fragment by . Robert M Pirsig. The book is Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.