How Coincidental...

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
OSCAR WILDE

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I'm reading this book for British Literature. The preface really is intune to what I'm studying in this class too.

Update.

I finished pt. I and II...
did an essay for the first part on the esthetics theory...
need to discuss the second part... its very transitional...

but an essay can be written!

I actually bought the book because I miss highlighting major points.
Unfortunently the font is smaller than this.

Quotes (continue to update 'til finish)

• "Mind has no matter or energy but they can't escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don't get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It's that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, it's just that that doesn't make it good or bad. Or ghosts either." 35-6.
• "What makes it important not to shut up about him was that he used this skill in such a bizarre and yet meaningful way. No one ever saw this, I dont think he even saw it himself, and it may be an illusion of my own, but the knife he used was less that of an assassin than that of a poor surgeon. Perhaps there is no difference. But he saw a sick and ailing thing happening and he started cutting deep, deeper, and deeper to get at the root of it. he was after something. That is important. He was after something and he used the knife because that was the only tool he had. But he took on so much and went so far in the end his real victim was himself." 76
• "What is the truth and how do you know it when you have it...? How do we really know anything? Is there an "I", a "soul" which knows, or is the soul merely cells coordinating senses?... Is reality basically changing, or is it fixed and permanent? When it's said that something means something, what's meant by that?"126
• "It's [romantic rejection of rationality] such a powerful, all-dominating agent of civlised man, it's all but shut out everything else and now man dominates himself." 127
• "It wasn't just eighteenth-century ugliness or 'technical' ugliness. All of the philosophers he was reading showed it. The whole university he was attending smelled of the same ugliness. It was everywhere, in the classroom, in the textbooks. It was in himself and he didn't know how or why. It was reason itself that was ugly and there seemed no way to get free." 134
• "It's the problem of our time. The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specialization has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him. The lunchtime here-and-now stuff is speciality too." 136

There is no way...

... that you can write an essay about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance unless its about a kajillion pages long. Every chapter can have it's own essay, but I'm just going to write a reflection on each part... thats more formal than these posts. My main focus is going to be on the Esthetics theory for this class, and then other philosophies that the narrator/ Phaedrus formulates for Theories of SELF. Good idea? I think so...

Zen continued...

The esthetics theory slaps you right in the face. Several times. There is a section where he talks about the difference betwixt analytic and romantic view of life; he uses the motorcycle as an analogy to this. Mechanics look at the motorcycles on an underlying degree whilst the narrator simply sees a whole being worked on. This theme reappears throughout the book when talking about technology and science as well. These discussions help us with the understanding of Phaedrus, who is a personality of the narrator. We know that Phaedrus eventually goes through electrolysis and forgets himself, but we are slowly learning how and why.

The passage that still sticks out to me the most is the narrator's response when his son asks him about ghosts. He said that he does not mind believing in ghosts because they only exist in the mind... like logic.