Robert Pirsig - Lila. An Inquiry Into Morals

to Wendy and Nell

The author wishes to givespecial thanks to the Guggenheim Foundationfor the grant under whichthis book was written.

Lila didnt know he washere. She was sound asleep, apparently in some fearful dream. In the darknesshe heard a grating sound of her teeth and felt her body suddenly turn as shestruggled against some menace only she could see.

The light from the openhatch above was so dim it concealed whatever lines of cosmetics and age werethere and now she looked softly cherubic, like a small girl with blond hair,wide cheekbones, a small turned-up nose, and a common childs face that seemedso familiar it attracted a certain natural affection. He got the feeling thatwhen morning came she should pop open her sky-blue eyes and they should sparklewith excitement at the prospect of a new day of sunlight and parents smilingand maybe bacon cooking on the stove and happiness everywhere.

But that wasnt how itwould be. When Lilas eyes opened in a hung-over daze shed look into thefeatures of a gray-haired man she wouldnt even remembersomeone she met in abar the previous night. Her nausea and headache might produce some remorse andself-contempt but not much, he thoughtshed been through this many timesand shed slowly try to figure out how to return to whatever life shed beenleading before she met this one.

Her voice murmuredsomething like Look out! Then she said something unintelligible and turnedaway, then pulled the blanket up around her head, perhaps against the coldbreeze that came down through the open hatch. The berth of the sailboat was sonarrow that this turn of her body brought her up against him again and he feltthe whole length of her and then her warmth. An earlier lust came back and hisarm went over her so that his hand held her breastfull there but too soft,like something over-ripe that would soon go bad.

He wanted to wake her andtake her again but as he thought about this a sad feeling rose up and forbadeit. The more he hesitated the more the sadness grew. He would like to know herbetter. Hed had a feeling all night that he had seen her before somewhere, along time ago.

That thought seemed tobring it all down. Now the sadness came on in full and blended with thedarkness of the cabin and with the dim indigo light through the hatch above. Upthere were stars, framed by the hatch opening so that they seemed to move whenthe boat rocked. Part of Orion momentarily disappeared, then appeared again.Soon all the winter constellations would be back.

Cars rolling over abridge in the distance sounded clearly through the cold night air. They were ontheir way to Kingston, somewhere on the bluffs above, over the Hudson River.The boat was berthed here in this tiny creek for a nights rest on the waysouth.

There was not much time.There was almost no green left in the trees along the river. Many of the turnedleaves had already fallen. During these last few days, gusts of cold wind hadswept down the river valley from the north, swirling the leaves up off theirbranches into the air in sudden spiraling flights of red and maroon and goldand brown across the water of the river into the path of the boat as it moveddown the buoyed channel. There had been hardly any other boats in the channel.A few boats at docks along the river bank seemed abandoned and forlorn now thatsummer had ended and their owners had turned to other pursuits. Overhead the Vsof ducks and geese had been everywhere, flying down on the north wind from theCanadian Arctic. Many of them must have been just ducklings and goslings whenhe first began this voyage from the inland ocean of Lake Superior, a thousandmiles 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 himselfand then he saw the entire boat was covered with ice.

Phdrus wondered wherehe had seen Lila before, but he didnt know. It seemed as though he had seenher, though. It was autumn then too, he thought, November, and it was verycold. He remembered the streetcar was almost empty except for him and themotorman and the conductor and Lila and her girlfriend sitting back three seatsbehind him. The seats were yellow woven rattan, hard and tough, designed foryears of wear, and then a few years later the buses replaced them and thetracks and overhead cables and the streetcars were all gone.

He remembered he had seenthree movies in a row and smoked too many cigarettes and had a bad headache andit was still about half an hour of pounding along the tracks before thestreetcar would let him off and then he would have a block and a half throughthe dark to get home where there would be some aspirin and it would be about anhour and a half after that before the headache would go away. Then he heardthese two girls giggle very loudly and he turned to see what it was. Theystopped very suddenly and they looked at him in such a way that there couldhave been only one thing they were giggling at. It was him. He had a big noseand poor posture and wasnt anything to look at, and tended to relate poorly toother people. The one on the left who looked like she had been giggling theloudest was Lila. The same face, exactlygold hair and smooth complexion andblue eyeswith a smothered smile she probably thought covered up what she waslaughing at. They got off a couple of blocks later, still talking and laughing.

A few months later he sawher again in a downtown rush-hour crowd. It happened in a moment and then itwas over. She turned her head and he saw in her face that she recognized himand she seemed to pause, waiting for him to do something, say something. But hedidnt act. He didnt have that skill of relating quickly to people, and thenit was too late, somehow, and they each went on and he wondered for a long timethat afternoon, and for days after that, who she was and what it would havebeen like if he had gone over and said something. The next summer he thought hesaw her at a bathing beach in the south part of the city. She was lying in thesand so that when he walked past her he saw her face upside down and he wassuddenly very excited. This time he wouldnt just stand there. This time hewould act, and he worked up his courage and went back and stood in the sand ather feet and then saw that the right-side-up face wasnt Lila. It was someoneelse. He remembered how sad that was. He didnt have anybody in those days.

But that was so long agoyears and years ago. She would have changed. There was no chance that thiswas the same person. And he didnt know her anyway. What difference did itmake? Why should he remember such an insignificant incident like that all theseyears?

These half-forgottenimages are strange, he thought, like dreams. This sleeping Lila whom he hadjust met tonight was someone else too. Or not someone else exactly, but someoneless specific, less individual. There is Lila, this single private person whoslept beside him now, who was born and now lived and tossed in her dreams andwill soon enough die and then there is someone elsecall her Lilawho isimmortal, who inhabits Lila for a while and then moves on. The sleeping Lila hehad just met tonight. But the waking Lila, who never sleeps, had been watchinghim and he had been watching her for a long time.

It was so strange. Allthe time he had been coming down the canal through lock after lock she had beenmaking the same journey but he didnt know she was there. Maybe he had seenher in the locks at Troy, looked right at her in the dark but had not seen her.

His chart had shown aseries of locks close together but they didnt show altitude and they didntshow how confusing things could get when distances have been miscalculated andyou are running late and are exhausted. It wasnt until he was actually in thelocks that danger was apparent as he tried to sort out green lights and redlights and white lights and lights of locktenders' houses and lights of otherboats coming the other way and lights of bridges and abutments and God knowswhat else was out there in that black that he didnt want to hit in the middleof the darkness or go aground either. Hed never seen them before and it was atense experience, and it was amidst all this tension that he seemed to rememberseeing her on another boat.