Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Today is Pirsig's Birthday

One of the most influential books in my long affair with literature.
"The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there." — Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

Thanks to Garrison Keillor for the tip.

This too, found after Writer's Almanac today.


from Wikipedia: The novel's title is a quotation taken from the novel's end, where Susie
ponders her friends' and family's newfound strength after her
death:



"These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the
connections — sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often
magnificent — that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a
way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death brought
were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some
unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this
miraculous lifeless body had been my life.[1]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lovely_Bones

A book I've yet to read.