Some more from that great book ...
"You never gain something but that you lose something." -Thoreau
"Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's the psyschic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the phsychic distances bewteen people are small, and here it's reversed [on the West coast]."
... growing up in North Dakota but having lived elsewhere this one truly hits home. I was amazed at how fulfilled I was living in North Dakota last summer. I only had one word to explain it, the people, oh, the people.
"There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and move spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their life without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimporant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV."
... the difference, Pirsig explains, is that in secondary America (Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas) what is around us - what is real - dominates. The back roads, mountains, meditative thoughts, bumblebees and open sky mile after mile. Strange that fewer people can equal less loneliness, but I buy it. Hey, media, don't we want to make people MORE aware of what is around us instead of convincing them it is unimportant? We can all work on this.
"You never gain something but that you lose something." -Thoreau
"Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's the psyschic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the phsychic distances bewteen people are small, and here it's reversed [on the West coast]."
... growing up in North Dakota but having lived elsewhere this one truly hits home. I was amazed at how fulfilled I was living in North Dakota last summer. I only had one word to explain it, the people, oh, the people.
"There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and move spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their life without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimporant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV."
... the difference, Pirsig explains, is that in secondary America (Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas) what is around us - what is real - dominates. The back roads, mountains, meditative thoughts, bumblebees and open sky mile after mile. Strange that fewer people can equal less loneliness, but I buy it. Hey, media, don't we want to make people MORE aware of what is around us instead of convincing them it is unimportant? We can all work on this.
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