Mental Reflection

Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV. –Zen and the Art of motorcycle maintenance.
I do a lot of mental reflection on Sundays. Everyone is so busy on Sundays watching movies or reading or whatever it is that they really want to do because they have time off from doing all the stuff that they have to do, and somehow Sunday’s are so inherently quite for no apparent reason it is not a very suited for talking, nobody really feels like it.
I have been reading this book (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance) for a long time and watching stuff on my computer and doing absolutely nothing else this semester, which gives me a sense of detachment from law school, which I am taking as a good thing, because early this semester I was feeling so disconnected from everything so much that it is my firm conviction that I was dangerously close to going insane. Disconnected and detached are so different. I wrote something during that time, so I could remember what I was thinking then, but it is unimportant. One of the things I do when I am feeling not like I would like to feel is read ‘Catcher in the rye’. I am very obsessed with the book, I have realised. Anyway, this time, I could see Holden was not completely right in the head. That he was having a nervous breakdown, like people said he was. That really scared me. That clearly meant that I was thinking differently, or that the structure of my thinking had changed, because I have said before on this blog that I never realised how anyone could think that Holden did not make complete sense all the time.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance is taking a long time to read because I keep going back to read everything again and again. It had a head start at being one of my favourite books of all time because I started reading it when I thought I was going insane, and I looked at the book as if it was some saviour. (It said on the cover that it would change the way you think and feel about your life, which I thought could only be a good thing at that point) By now, I am on 250 something, and it is definitely one of my favourite books ever. I am not going to say anything about it just now because I am not sure I have completely understood what Mr.Pirsig is talking about yet, which I guess is partly because he hasn’t finished saying it. And anyway, this blog entry is only to put an end to the long dry spell. I don’t really have anything to say, but I haven’t written anything since the holidays in Delhi, and unless I really start doing something I will never really start doing something. What I really feel like doing now is watch one of the films, from, you know, the new wave thingy. Like Jules et Jim. I have never seen it.
I have noticed that I have this really weird idea of what is aesthetically pleasing. I am not saying I am very hip and unconventional or anything. I don’t know what it is. There is this balance between neat and practical and beautiful that I like. Today, when I was mentally reflecting on it I realised it has something to do with my grandmother. There is no point explaining that to you because you don’t know her (I don’t know who I am talking to when I write this. Weird.) The reason I reflected upon this was because Mr. Pirsig says the reason people see quality differently is because they are approaching it with different set of analogues. Someone’s choice of quality defines them.
Please go read the book.