From: Nathan Pila (pila@sympatico.ca)
Date: Mon Nov 17 2003 - 20:45:28 GMT
Sebastian,
I read it the same way. When someone who you have spent a lot of time with
dies, a hole or vacuum is created. It is very much like the metaphor you
use, of ripples in water after a stone has fallen. In that way, Chris still
has influence. But Chris, once dead is not as real as he once was. Surely
you agree to that? I will assert that a live person is more real and has
more power than a dead person.
Nathan
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sebastian Hammer" <quinn@indexdata.dk>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>; <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2003 7:58 AM
Subject: Re: MD Dead is dead ?
> At 07:22 17-11-2003 -0500, Nathan Pila wrote:
>
> >When I was younger I read Superman comics. Your idea of a 'larger
pattern'
> >sounds familiar. It reminds me of the Phantom Zone of the Superman
comics,
> >where disembodied souls float around in another dimension.
>
> When I read Pirsig's description of his Chris's death, I always took the
> 'larger pattern' to have more to do with the persistent influences of
> person on his environment, primarily on the lives and minds of other
> people. These influences remain, like rings remain in water after a stone
> has dropped out of sight. You can reach into the water and remove the
stone
> entirely, but the rings, the larger pattern, remains. The person may be
> gone, but his impact on you remains a reality -- you just can't
communicate
> with him anymore. If you also accept that much of what we perceive to be
> 'reality' are in fact mental constructs, then the 'ghost' of Chris is
> indeed as real as anything else, and for those who knew him, his
subsequent
> 'reincarnation' is an adequate model of reality, even if it has nothing to
> do with spirituality in the carnival freak show sense of the word.
>
> In some sense, those few words out of the author's notes in an old
> paperback edition of ZAMM have had as large an impact on my thinking about
> life and death as anything in his writing, and I'm grateful to him for
that.
>
> --Sebastian
>
>
>
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