Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

by Robert M. Pirsig

  Still no answer.

  Do you want something to eat?

  She shook her head and smiled dreamily.

  He got up and tugged at her shoulder. Come on, he said, you’re falling asleep.

  She woke a little, looked at him blindly, then carefully wrapped the doll again and got up. She stepped ahead of him like a sleepwalker into the forecabin and there placed the doll carefully in the bunk ahead of her and then slowly climbed in.

  Sleep as long as you want, he said.

  She didn’t answer. She seemed to be asleep already.

  He went back and sat down.

  That wasn’t so hard, he thought.

  He wondered what he would do with her in the morning. Maybe she’d snap out of it. That sometimes happened.

  He got a flashlight and lifted the cabin sole boards to check the level of water in the bilge.

  It was still quite low.

  He then got a wrench and opened the top of the drinking water tank and shone the flashlight beam inside. It looked about half-full. He could fill it tomorrow morning, he thought, just before he left.

  What the hell? How could he leave tomorrow? What was he going to do with her?

  He went back and sat down again. He wasn’t really coming to grips with this.

  After a while he supposed he could call the police.

  And say what? he wondered.

  Well, you see, I’ve got this crazy lady on my boat and I’d like to have you get her off.

  How did she get on your boat? they would ask.

  Well, she got on at Kingston, he would say… ridiculous. There was no way he was going to win that conversation.

  He supposed the easiest legitimate way out of the whole mess would be to get her to see a psychiatrist. Then, whatever happened to her, he’d be done with her. That’s what they’re for. But how was he going to talk her into that? He could barely get her into the bunk up there.

  And who was going to pay? Those guys don’t come cheap. Would they take her as a charity case? An out-of-towner in New York? Hardly. And anyway just the paper-work of it, the bureaucracy, could make it days before he got out of here.

  Slowly the predicament he was in began to dawn on him. Boy! There’s no such thing as a free lunch. She really had him trapped. There was no way he could get rid of her now. What the hell was he going to do?

  This wasn’t tragic. This was so dumb it was comic. He was really stuck with her!

  He could see himself spending the rest of his life with this crazy lady up in the forecabin, never daring to report her, traveling from port to port like some yachting Flying Dutchman — a servant to her for the rest of his life.

  He felt like Woody Allen… That’s who should play him in the movies. Woody Allen. He’d get it right.

  What to do? This was impossible.

  He realized he could just take her out and dump her overboard. He thought about it for a while, until it started to give him a sick depressed feeling. No sense in being ridiculous. He was really stuck.

  It was cold in the cabin. The shock of all this must have prevented him from noticing it. He got out the charcoal briquets and built a fire in the heater, but all of the matches went out. More Woody Allen. All of a sudden nothing was working.

  He went over in his mind all the things that had happened since he first met her in Kingston. She had given little warnings that something like this might happen. She was such a stranger he just hadn’t recognized it. The sudden anger over nothing, that crazy sex episode in the forecabin in Nyack. She had been acting that way all along.

  He guessed that’s what Rigel was trying to warn him about.

  He thought of starting up the stove for some coffee, but decided not to. He should try to get some sleep himself. There was nothing he could do now that couldn’t be done in the morning. He rolled a sleeping bag out on the bunk, undressed and got in.

  The talk about the boatman, what was that about?

  He wondered why she picked him up, of all people, at that bar.

  She must see him as some sort of refuge. Some sort of savior.

  He began to think about how isolated she really was.

  After a while he guessed that must be the whole explanation. That’s why she came back here tonight. Apparently he was the only person she could come to.

  He didn’t know what he was going to do with her.

  Just listen to her for a while, he supposed, and then figure it out. That’s all he could do.

  The absence of any harbor sounds here was strange. Here in New York Harbor he’d expected tugboats and barges going through the night and heavy ocean vessels. Not this. This was like some peaceful inland lake somewhere…

  Sleep didn’t come… That light he saw around her. It was trying to tell him something.

  It was saying, wake up.

  But wake up to what?

  Wake up to your obligations, maybe.

  What were they?

  Maybe not to be so static.

  It was a long time now since those years when Phædrus had been a mental patient. He’d become very static. He was more intelligible to the sane now because he’d moved closer to them. But he’d become a lot farther away from people like Lila.

  Now he saw her the same way others had seen him years ago. And now he was behaving exactly the way they did. They could be excused for not knowing better. They didn’t know what it was like. But he didn’t have that excuse.

  It’s a legitimate point of view. It’s the lifeboat problem. If you get too involved with too many people with too many problems they drag you under. You don’t save them. They sink you.

  Of course she’s unimportant. Of course she’s a waste of time. She’s causing an interruption of other more important purposes in life. No one admits it, but that’s really the reason the insane get locked up. They’re disgusting people you want to get rid of but can’t. It’s not just that they have absurd ideas that nobody else believes. What makes them insane is that they have these ideas and are a nuisance to somebody else.

  The only thing that’s illegitimate is the cover-up, the pretense that you’re trying to help them by getting rid of them. But really there was no way Lila was going to sink him. She was just a nuisance now, and he could handle that. Maybe that’s what the light was trying to tell him. He had no choice but to try to help her, nuisance or not. Otherwise he would just injure himself. You can’t just run off from other people without injuring yourself too.

  Well, he thought… she’s either come to the best possible person or to the worst possible person. No way yet to know which.

  He rolled over and lay quietly.

  He knew he had heard that talk of hers before, that style, and now he remembered some of the people he had talked to in the insane asylum. When people are going insane they tend to get very ingenuous like that… What did he remember? It all seemed so long ago.

  Aunt Ellen. When he was seven.

  There was a noise in the downstairs in the dark. His parents thought it was a burglar, but it was Ellen. Her eyes were wide. Some man was chasing her, she said. He was trying to hypnotize her and do things to her.

  Later, at the asylum Phædrus remembered her pleading, I’m all right. I’m all right! They’re just keeping me here when I know I’m all right.

  Afterward his mother and her sisters had cried as they left. But they didn’t see what he saw.

  He never forgot what he saw, that Ellen wasn’t frightened of the insanity. She was frightened of them.

  That was the hardest thing to deal with during his own commitment. Not the insanity. That came naturally. The hardest thing to deal with was the righteousness of the sane.

  When you’re in agreement with the sane they’re a great comfort and protection, but when you disagree with them it’s another matter. Then they’re dangerous. Then they’ll do anything. The sinister thing that struck the most fear in him was what they’d do in the name of kindness. The ones he cared about most and who cared about him most suddenly, a
ll of them, turned against him the same way they had against Ellen. They kept saying, There’s no way we can reach you. If only we could make you understand.

  He saw that the sane always know they are good because their culture tells them so. Anyone who tells them otherwise is sick, paranoid, and needs further treatment. To avoid that accusation Phædrus had had to be very careful of what he said when he was in the hospital. He told the sane what they wanted to hear and kept his real thoughts to himself.

  He turned back again. This pillow was like a rock. She had all the good pillows up there. No way to get one now… It didn’t matter.

  That was what was wrong with making a film about his book. You can’t film insanity.

  Maybe if, during the show, the whole theater collapsed and the audience found themselves among the stars with just space all around and no support, wondering what a stupid thing this is, sitting here among the stars watching this film that has nothing to do with them and then suddenly realizing that this film is the only reality there is and that they had better get interested in it because what they see and what they are is the same thing and once it stops they will stop too…

  That’s it. Everything! Gone!!

  Nothing left!!

  And then after a while this dream of some kind going on, and them in it.

  That’s the way it was. He’d gotten so used to being in this dream called sanity he hardly ever thought about it any more. Just once in a while, when something like this reminded him of it. Now he could see the light just rarely, once in a while, like tonight. But back then the light had been everything.

  It wasn’t that any particular thing looked different. It was that the whole context of everything was completely different although it contained the same things.

  He remembered a metaphor that had occurred to him of a bug that had been crawling around in some smelly sock all his life and now someone or something had turned the sock inside out. The terrain he covered, the details of his life, were all the same, but now somehow everything seemed open and free and all the horrible confining smell of everything was gone.

  Another metaphor that had occurred to him was that he’d been on a tight-rope all of his life. Now he’d fallen off and found that instead of crashing he was flying, a strange new talent he never knew he had.

  He remembered how he kept to himself the feeling of exhilaration, of old mysteries being solved and new mysteries being explored. He remembered how it seemed to him that he hadn’t entered any cataleptic trance. He had fallen out of one. He was free of a static pattern of life he’d thought was unchangeable.

  The boat rocked a little and he became aware again of where he was. Crazy. He was going to be insane again if he didn’t get some sleep. Too much chaos… streets, noises, people he hadn’t seen for more than a year, Robert Redford, suddenly juxtaposed against all this boat background… and now this Lila business on top of it all. Too much… It all keeps changing, changing, changing. He’d wanted not to get stuck in some static pattern, but this was too fluid. There ought to be some halfway mixture of chaos and stability. He was getting too old for all this.

  Maybe he should read for a while. Here he was, at a dock, all plugged into 120-volt power for the first time in weeks and he hadn’t enjoyed it once. He could read all the new mail. That would calm him down, maybe.

  After a while he got up, got the 120-volt reading lamp out of its bin, plugged it in and switched it. It didn’t work. Probably the power line was disconnected at the dock. That always seemed to happen. It was cold in here too. He would have to get the fire going again.

  He put his trousers and sweater on, got a flashlight and a voltmeter from the tool box and opened the hatch to fix the light.

  Outside, the rain had stopped but the sky was still overcast and reflecting the lights of the city. The rain would continue later, maybe. He’d find out in the morning.

  On the dock he saw his electric cord was plugged in. He went over to its post, unplugged it and substituted voltmeter leads. No electricity there.

  It wasn’t so good, he supposed, to stand barefoot on a wet dock checking 120-volt circuits. He opened a cover on one side of the post and found it, a switch that, sure enough, was OFF. They always do that to you. When he turned it on, the voltmeter showed 114 volts.

  Back in the boat the lamp worked too. He got some alcohol and restored the fire in the stove.

  He guessed he didn’t want to read the mail yet. That took special concentration. After hundreds of fan letters saying almost identical things it got harder and harder to read them with a fresh mind. More of the celebrity problem, and he didn’t want to get into that any more today.

  There were those books he’d bought. He could read them. One of the disadvantages of this boat life is you don’t get to use public libraries. But he had found a bookstore with an old two-volume biography of William James that should hold him for a while. Nothing like some good old philosophology to put someone to sleep. He took the top volume out of the canvas bag, climbed into the sleeping bag and looked at the book’s cover for a while.

  26

  He liked that word philosophology. It was just right. It had a nice dull, cumbersome, superfluous appearance that exactly fitted its subject matter, and he’d been using it for some time now. Philosophology is to philosophy as musicology is to music, or as art history and art appreciation are to art, or as literary criticism is to creative writing. It’s a derivative, secondary field, a sometimes parasitic growth that likes to think it controls its host by analyzing and intellectualizing its host’s behavior.

  Literature people are sometimes puzzled by the hatred many creative writers have for them. Art historians can’t understand the venom either. He supposed the same was true with musicologists but he didn’t know enough about them. But philosophologists don’t have this problem at all because the philosophers who would normally condemn them are a null-class. They don’t exist. Philosophologists, calling themselves philosophers, are just about all there are.

  You can imagine the ridiculousness of an art historian taking his students to museums, having them write a thesis on some historical or technical aspect of what they see there, and after a few years of this giving them degrees that say they are accomplished artists. They’ve never held a brush or a mallet and chisel in their hands. All they know is art history.

  Yet, ridiculous as it sounds, this is exactly what happens in the philosophology that calls itself philosophy. Students aren’t expected to philosophize. Their instructors would hardly know what to say if they did. They’d probably compare the student’s writing to Mill or Kant or somebody like that, find the student’s work grossly inferior, and tell him to abandon it. As a student Phædrus had been warned that he would come a cropper if he got too attached to any philosophical ideas of his own.

  Literature, musicology, art history and philosophology thrive in academic institutions because they are easy to teach. You just Xerox something some philosopher has said and make the students discuss it, make them memorize it, and then flunk them at the end of the quarter if they forget it. Actual painting, music composition and creative writing are almost impossible to teach and so they barely get in the academic door. True philosophy doesn’t get in at all. Philosophologists often have an interest in creating philosophy but, as philosophologists, they subordinate it, much as a literary scholar might subordinate his own interest in creative writing. Unless they are exceptional they don’t consider the creation of philosophy their real line of work.

  As an author, Phædrus had been putting off the philosophology, partly because he didn’t like it, and partly to avoid putting a philosophological cart before the philosophical horse. Philosophologists not only start by putting the cart first; they usually forget the horse entirely. They say first you should read what all the great philosophers of history have said and then you should decide what you want to say. The catch here is that by the time you’ve read what all the great philosophers of history have said you’ll be at least tw
o hundred years old. A second catch is that these great philosophers are very persuasive people and if you read them innocently you may be carried away by what they say and never see what they missed.

  Phædrus, in contrast, sometimes forgot the cart but was fascinated by the horse. He thought the best way to examine the contents of various philosophological carts is first to figure out what you believe and then to see what great philosophers agree with you. There will always be a few somewhere. These will be much more interesting to read since you can cheer what they say and boo their enemies, and when you see how their enemies attack them you can kibitz a little and take a real interest in whether they were right or wrong.

  With this technique you can approach someone like William James in a much different way than an ordinary philosophologist would. Since you’ve already done your creative thinking before you read James, you don’t just go along with him. You get all kinds of fresh new ideas by contrasting what he’s saying with what you already believe. You’re not limited by any dead-ends of his thought and can often see ways of going around him. This was occurring in what Phædrus had read so far. He was getting a definite impression that James' philosophy was incomplete and that the Metaphysics of Quality might actually improve on it. A philosophologist would normally be indignant at the impertinence of someone thinking he could improve on the great Harvard philosopher, but James himself, to judge from what Phædrus had read so far, would have been very enthusiastic about the effort. He was, after all, a philosopher.

  Anyway, the reason Phædrus bought these books on James was that it was necessary to bone up a little in order to protect his Metaphysics of Quality against attack. So far he had pretty much ignored the philosophologists and they had pretty much returned the compliment. But with this next book he was unlikely to be so lucky, since a metaphysics is something anyone can pick to pieces. Some of them, at least, would be at it, picking and sneering in the time-honored tradition of literary critics, musicologists, and art historians, and he had better be ready for them.