To tell the truth

Welcome to this week's Reno News & Review.

What was the crazy crap I was writing about last week? The nature of time, as in, the difference between what's on the clock and what the clock appears to measure but to which it only exists in parallel?

You might as well ask, “What is truth?” which was a joke I alluded to this morning, confusing the books of Mark and John as I sometimes do. Jokes are risky, though, and it's difficult, particularly for guys like me, to know if someone “gets” me or my jokes.

But if time is a heady topic, and truth is impossible to know, I've got to tell you, there's never been a concept that screwed me up like the concept of “quality.” I must have read Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at a point in my life when I was particularly vulnerable to metaphysical thinking.

In fact, that time, which I'd guess was about 1982, was one of the few times in my life when I had a nickname that I actually answered to. I was on the Catholic campus of Benedictine College of Kansas, and my nickname was Mr. Reality. I loved to drink and talk about things that mattered—things that I look at now like I watch a dog chasing its tail.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance asks a pretty difficult question in the most simple way possible: What is quality? That simple question drove the author insane, and it had a pretty radical effect on me, too. The idea is that there is something inside of us all that knows the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, and that sense of “quality” cuts across cultures and philosophies.

Is this the basis for postmodernism? I can't say which way Pirsig would argue. Plainly, he took his consideration back to Socrates, who in some ways was the beginning of the Western thinking that post-modernism attempts to deny. But if Socrates had feet of clay then what does our philosophy stand upon?

Seems as though I'll have some time to consider all that because I'm officially on spring break from teaching and being a master's student, and my girl is taking me down to Sonoma. I'll have a glass of red with essence of almond, please.