All 9 Uses of
debris
in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated.†
Part 1debris = pieces of something that has been destroyed; or trash that is lying around
- All the time we are aware of millions of things around us...these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road...aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see.†
Part 1
- It's sometimes argued that there's no real progress; that a civilization that kills multitudes in mass warfare, that pollutes the land and oceans with ever larger quantities of debris, that destroys the dignity of individuals by subjecting them to a forced mechanized existence can hardly be called an advance over the simpler hunting and gathering and agricultural existence of prehistoric times.†
Part 2
- A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset.†
Part 2 *
- What's left now is just fragments: debris, scattered notes, which can be pieced together but which leave huge areas unexplained.†
Part 3
- When I first discovered this debris I felt like some agricultural peasant near the outskirts of, say, Athens, who occasionally and without much surprise plows up stones that have strange designs on them.†
Part 3
- Later, when I developed more confidence in my immunity to his affliction, I became interested in this debris in a more positive way and began to jot down the fragments amorphically, that is, without regard to form, in the order in which they occurred to me.†
Part 3
- They go forging ahead, seeing only their noble, distant goal, and never notice any of the crud and debris they leave behind them.†
Part 3
- The wind blows dirt through the cracks of the windows of an old car with soot on the windows, and Chris, six, sits beside him, with sweaters on because the heater doesn't work, and through the dirty windows of the windblown car they see that they move forward toward a grey snowless sky between walls of grey and greyishbrown buildings with brick fronts, with broken glass between the brick fronts and debris in the streets.†
Part 4