> "Phaedrus wasn't sure but he seemed to detect a peculiar gentleness > here on the streets now that he didn't remember from the past. It was > an ominous gentleness found in old and corrupt cultures, the > gentleness one hears in Neapolitan street songs and in old Mexican > canciones. It comes not from an absence of violence but from an > excess of it. Live and let live. Avoid trouble. It was the gentleness > of someone who has given up fighting openly because it is too > dangerous to do so. He had the sickening feeling that something like > the fall of the Roman Empire was beginning to happen here." (LILA)
Pirsig continues in the same paragraph:: "What was so sinister now about New York was that the patterns that built it no longer seemed understood-or those who understand the patterns are no longer in control of those who don't. "What seemed to allow this deadly night to descend was that the intellectual patterns that were supposed to be in charge of things, that should comprehend the threat and lead the fight against it, were paralyzed. They were paralyzed, not by any external force, but by their own internal construction, which made them unable to comprehend what was happening." (Lila, 24) Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
