Lila An Inquiry Into Morals [Paperback]

The author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance examines life's essential issues as he recounts the journey down the Hudson River in a sailboat of his philosopher-narrator Phaedrus.Robert Pirsigwas 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 classicZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and its sequel, Lila. He died in 2017.1.
 
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 thlc,