"Writing it seemed to have higher quality than not writing it, that was all."

When I hit the last part of this book, specifically the area in which Phaedrus is describing being in the philosophy class with the rude and awful teacher, I started thinking, This is why I'm a fiction person. Because, at least when it's fiction, I know the author is using "lies" to tell an intended truth/message, etc, what have you. And what kept coming back to me was the small author's note from the beginning, stating that much of the story has been changed for rhetorical purposes, but to regard the following as fact. It drove me nuts through most of this book, because I kept doubting the semi-autobiographicalness of the writing.  I kept searching for this black and white line the entire time, and then, after reading the afterword and the introduction, I had this epiphany moment where everything fell into place and I realized the the narrator had been trying to teach me about the gray. I'm going to attempt to explain how that happened, but I'm not sure I know how to just yet; one, because there's so much, and two, because I'm still so shaken over Chris's death and the appearance of Nell, and the idea of ghosts.

"And finally: Phaedrus, following a path that to his knowledge had never been taken before in the history of Western though, went straight between the horns of the subjectivity-objectivity dilemma and Quality is neither a part of mind, nor is it a part of matter, it is a third entity which is independent of the other two." (Pirsig, 240).

In threes. It's always in threes. (And I don't think it's any coincidence for me that immediately after that paragraph comes one of my favorite passages for "romantic" reasons, I suppose, as the book would say: "He was heard along the corridors and up and down the stairs of Montana Hall singing softly to himself, almost under his breath, 'Holy, holy, holy...blessed Trinity.") And so, if I'm seeing it correctly, Quality could be called a priori; it's not mind or matter, it's something beyond the two, not immediate to the senses? That seems to make sense to me. The problem with trying to draw any sort of conclusion for myself at the end of all of this is that I still don't know any of it for certain. I'm still feeling that uncertainty, and I'll continue to go in circles with a question until I start to lose my grip - and looking in that frame of mind, it's easy to see how Phaedrus was driven mad by this.

So, do we try to grasp those concepts? Or do we take a step back and see that these questions are woven into the "pattern" as he calls it, of our realities, that will keep recurring long after we're gone?

Whew. I don't know anything for certain after finishing this; only that I have that feeling that I sometimes get, as though something so huge has opened beneath and around me that I won't understand what it is or what it has done to me until later.