Glimpses

Hello,

Hello,

Hello friend, Two weeks ago, I wrote you in regards to Phaedrus’ school without grades and other scholastic related ideas. You raised some questions in regards to my letter to which I will respond. You raised the question “If one takes care of the knowledge will grades—and grad school—take care of themselves?” Let us look at that question. In the case of grades, it depends on how knowledge reflects grades, more precisely, what knowledge is reflected in the grades. Pirsig and Phaedrus spent quite a while discussing why quality is not definable. They went on to say quality is different to each of us because we all bring our own a priori analogues, which define quality for us. Luckily, since we live in the same world we also share experiences allowing overlap between experiences and analogues, which give the ability to converse with one another, our views of quality, have met with some degree of harmony. The exact degree of overlap or harmony can very widely from one quality to another.

Hi again, I have been struggling with what to write about last weeks journey. Reading the article of science and religion in a post-modern world presented some possible points of conversation, but none of them grabbed me completely. Floating in the back of my mind was a topic I was itching to get out and talk about but having trouble relating it to very much in Pirsig's book. Then things began to unfold.

Greetings friend, It has been some time since I last wrote you. In that absence the journey with Pirsig has continued on as I continued to read despite a lack of correspondence and thus might have read beyond you. For a spell I found little in his book that I could easily relate too, and was beginning to wonder if I'd have much to tell you about my journey, however Pirsig began to talk about the experiments of Phaedrus during the first phase of his discovery of the meaning of quality. As I read about his gradeless classes and a desire to have school with students motivated by a yearning to learn and make knowledge there own, not just going for a piece of paper and grade point average, I began to get excited for alas someone was saying some of the very things I have thought for years.

Greetings friend, Pirsig's book is very hard to get into on an intellectual level. The book itself is quite easy to read, the words and grammar are not complex in the slightest, but when I try to relate to it I find my self sitting there with a blank stare on my face. I'm sure that what he has said is profound, but I don't know what to do with it. Phaedrus is quite a character, yet another part of Pirsig's book I'm not sure how to interpret. I find myself relating to him though, inspire of a very real feeling of distance. Phaedrus and I do share a passion for idealism. As Phaedrus moved into the high country of the mind he becomes very idealistic measuring all philosophers against his own thoughts and gets rather perturb when they disagree with him. I feel him trying to find a unified theory of everything, those exact words haven't shown up, nor has it really been pointed at, but thats the feeling I get as I read Phaedrus' thoughts. I, like Phaedrus, hold people up to my view of the world and they way I think it should operate. We are very much idealists together, just of a different breed with different areas of focus. Him with the high country of the mind, me with the morality of everyday life and circumstances. It is a bit odd reading about Phaedrus and his thoughts while knowing who he is and his fate in the back of my mind. Its not a particularly encouraging fate as in essence Phaedrus dies and all that is left is he has written down and the few memories of him that dwell in the minds of others, primarily Pirsig. I am eager to see how the rest of Pirsig's discussion of Phaedrus pans out and how Phaedrus' life is worked into the rest of the book. And perhaps his ending will not be as glum as I forecast for Phaedrus.

[acidfree:71 align: left title='']As I practice shooting through binoculars I'm getting better. Of course it also helps that I installed the Cannon tools onto my MacBook so that I can do remote shooting. It gives a slightly larger viewfinder, still not big enough in my opinion. I would like a 800x600 which it should be able to do since it can take video at that size. So here is a detail picture of the full Moon tonight. I've worked on it some to digitally enhance the surface detail. Its a nice 1280x1024 image, I set it as my background! Which is kinda cool.

[acidfree:68 align=left title=''] Somehow I have manage to lose the tripod mount for my binoculars that came with them. I looked online but the replacement from Celestron was $20! I didn't want to spend that much, so I looked around for 3rd party mounts, but they were still a bit pricey and all made of plastic. Deciding that I didn't want to spend $20 dollars if I could help, I called up Christopher and we went over to Ace Hardware. There we picked out an L-bracket, a wing-nut and a machine screw, and wallah, there is a tripod mount for my binoculars. The best part, other than it being solid metal, is it only cost $1.83! It may look a bit funny, but who cares, it works and its durable and I didn't spend a fortune.

[acidfree:65 align=right title='']Tonight was one of the first clear nights in a week or two, so since I have a new tripod I headed outside with my camera to take some shots of the Moon and Venus which are in conjunction, and I took my binoculars along just for fun. Granted it wasn't the best viewing conditions as I just stepped out side of Immel, so as you'd guess the light pollution in the middle of Bethany is pretty bad. But, the pictures are to horrible, its enough to make me wish I had a scope and digital SLR so I could get real pictures!

Thursday we have to submit a topic for a paper we will be writing for Christian Thought. I have my topic, at least a broad topic, I'm not sure if I will need to narrow it down and how much. I plan to write on the question "Why does God allow suffering?" Its a very old question, one that people have been asking for centuries and according to C.S. Lewis in his book "The Problem Of Pain" is the strongest weapon atheists yield against us as Christians.