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"I must believe, I must believe, that the heavy grace of God, which has brought me to this place, is all that can carry me out of it."

I love James Baldwin. He pulls no punches and makes no compromises. My first experience with him was Go Tell it on the Mountain, so I was a little skeptical about how I would like Giovanni's Room, but I never should of doubted him. He is so brutally honest about the sorrow and corruption he finds in himself and others, and yet he never loses his compassion and love for the beauty he finds there. His characters are never cliches, and they are never painful to be with no matter how deplorable their actions. The result makes my heart bigger and restores my faith in the novel.

Robert Prisig sets out to expand and fuse the limits of western and eastern philosophy with his "Quality" (which as far as I can tell is just an innacurate translation of Dao), but all he proves is how truly seductive the strawman argument can be to a big fish in a small pond. Is reading this "chautauqua" better than rotting your brain with the television he maligns? Maybe, but not by much, and it truly depends on what you're watching. At the very least, this book got me to give up on pop philosophy and just try to struggle with the originals (Plato, Aristotle, Kant etc.) because all I ever get out of this kind of stuff is a few interesting concepts buried under a mountain of frustration.

Here's a quote filled with the false dichotomies and strawmen that Prisig uses to constantly paint himself as able to pass judgement on all of art, history, philosophy, and motorcycles I guess:

"At present we're snowed under with an irrational loth expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences because there's no rational format for any understanding of scientific creativity. At present we are also snowed under with a lot of stylishness in the arts because there's very little assimilation or extension into underlying form. We have artists with no scientific Knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the results is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for real reunification of art and technology is really long over-due."

He is also mean to his son.