The despair grows now.

Like one of those movie dissolves in which you know you're not in the real world but it seems that way anyway.

It's a cold, snowless November day. 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 greyish-brown buildings with brick fronts, with broken glass between the brick fronts and debris in the streets.

"Where are we?" Chris says, and Phædrus says, "I don't know," and he really doesn't, his mind is all but gone. He is lost, drifting through the grey streets.

"Where are we going?" says Phædrus.

"To the bunk-bedders," says Chris.

"Where are they?" asks Phædrus.

"I don't know," says Chris. "Maybe if we just keep going we'll see them."

And so the two drive and drive through the endless streets looking for the bunk-bedders. Phædrus wants to stop and put his head on the steering wheel and just rest. The soot and the grey have penetrated his eyes and all but blotted cognizance from his brain. One street sign is like another. One grey-brown building is like the next. On and on they drive, looking for the bunk-bedders. But the bunk-bedders, Phædrus knows, he will never find.

Chris begins to realize slowly and by degrees that something is strange, that the person guiding the car is no longer really guiding it, that the captain is dead and the car is pilotless and he doesn't know this but only feels it and says stop and Phædrus stops.

A car behind honks, but Phædrus does not move. Other cars honk, and then others, and Chris in panic says, "GO!" and Phædrus slowly with agony pushes his foot on the clutch and puts the car in gear. Slowly, in dream-motion, the car moves in low through the streets.

"Where do we live?" Phædrus asks a frightened Chris.

Chris remembers an address, but doesn't know how to get there, but reasons that if he asks enough people he will find the way and so says, "Stop the car," and gets out and asks directions and leads a demented Phædrus through the endless walls of brick and broken glass.

Hours later they arrive and the mother is furious that they are so late. She cannot understand why they have not found the bunk-bedders. Chris says, "We looked everywhere," but looks at Phædrus with a quick glance of fright, of terror at something unknown. That, for Chris, is where it started.

It won't happen again. --

I think what I'll do is head down for San Francisco, and put Chris on a bus for home, and then sell the cycle and check in at a hospital -- or that last seems so pointless -- I don't know what I'll do.

The trip won't have been entirely wasted. At least he'll have some good memories of me as he grows up. That takes away some of the anxiety a little. That's a good thought to hold on to. I'll hold on to that.

Meanwhile, just continue on a normal trip and hope something improves. Don't throw anything away. Never, never throw anything away.

Cold out! Feels like winter! Where are we, that it should get this cold? We must be at a high altitude. I look out of the sleeping bag and this time see frost on the motorcycle. On the chrome of the gas tank it's sparkling in the early sunlight. On the black frame where the sunlight hits it it's partly turned to beads of water that will soon run down to the wheel. It's too cold to lie around.

I remember the dust under the pine needles and put my boots on carefully to avoid stirring it up. At the motorcycle I unpack everything, get out the long underwear and put it on, then clothes, then sweater, then jacket. I'm still cold.

I step through the spongy dust onto the dirt road that has brought us here and sprint down it through the pines for a hundred feet or so, then settle down to an even run and then finally stop. That feels better. Not a sound. The frost is in little patches on the road too, but melting and dark wet tan between the patches where the early sun's rays strike it. It's so white and lacy and untouched. It's on the trees too. I walk back softly down the road as if not to disturb the sunrise. Early autumn feeling.

Chris is still asleep and we won't be able to go anywhere until the air warms up. Good time to get the cycle tuned. I work loose the knob on the side cover over the air filter, and underneath the filter withdraw a worn and dirty roll of field tools. My hands are stiff with the cold and the backs of them are wrinkled. Those wrinkles aren't from the cold though. At forty that's old age coming on. I lay the roll on the seat and spread it open . . . there they are -- like seeing old friends again.

I hear Chris, glance over the seat and see that he's stirring but doesn't get up. He's evidently just rolling in his sleep. After a while the sun gets warmer and my hands aren't as stiff as they were.

I was going to talk about some of the lore of cycle repair, the hundreds of things you learn as you go along, which enrich what you're doing not only practically but esthetically. But that seems too trivial now, though I shouldn't say that.

But now I want to shift into another direction, which completes his story. I never really completed it because I didn't think it would be necessary. But now I think it would be a good time to do that in what time remains.

The metal of these wrenches is so cold it hurts the hands. But it's a good hurt. It's real, not imaginary, and it's here, absolutely, in my hand.

-- When you travel a path and note that another path breaks away to one side at, say, a 30-degree angle, and then later another path branches away to the same side at a broader angle, say 45 degrees, and another path later at 90 degrees, you begin to understand that there's some point over there that all the paths lead to and that a lot of people have found it worthwhile to go that way, and you begin to wonder out of curiosity if perhaps that isn't the way you should go too.

In his pursuit of a concept of Quality, Phædrus kept seeing again and again little paths all leading toward some point off to one side. He thought he already knew about the general area they led to, ancient Greece, but now he wondered if he had overlooked something there.

He had asked Sarah, who long before had come by with her watering pot and put the idea of Quality in his head, where in English literature quality, as a subject, was taught.

"Good heavens, I don't know, I'm not an English scholar," she had said. "I'm a classics scholar. My field is Greek."

"Is quality a part of Greek thought?" he had asked.

"Quality is every part of Greek thought," she had said, and he had thought about this. Sometimes under her old-ladyish way of speaking he thought he detected a secret canniness, as though like a Delphic oracle she said things with hidden meanings, but he could never be sure.

Ancient Greece. Strange that for them Quality should be everything while today it sounds odd to even say quality is real. What unseen changes could have taken place?

A second path to ancient Greece was indicated by the sudden way the whole question, What is quality?, had been jolted into systematic philosophy. He had thought he was done with that field. But "quality" had opened it all up again.

Systematic philosophy is Greek. The ancient Greeks invented it and, in so doing, put their permanent stamp on it. Whitehead's statement that all philosophy is nothing but "footnotes to Plato" can be well supported. The confusion about the reality of Quality had to start back there sometime.

A third path appeared when he decided to move on from Bozeman toward the Ph.D. degree he needed to continue University teaching. He wanted to pursue the enquiry into the meaning of Quality that his English teaching had started. But where? And in which discipline?

It was apparent that the term "Quality" was not within any one discipline unless that discipline was philosophy. And he knew from his experience with philosophy that further study there was unlikely to uncover anything concerning an apparently mystic term in English composition.

He became more and more aware of the possibility that there was no program available where he might study Quality in terms resembling those in which he understood it. Quality lay not only outside any academic discipline, it lay outside the grasp of the methods of the entire Church of Reason. It would take quite a University to accept a doctoral thesis in which the candidate refused to define his central term.

He looked through the catalogs for a long time before he discovered what he hoped he was looking for. There was one University, the University of Chicago, where there existed an interdisciplinary program in "Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods." The examining committee included a professor of English, a professor of philosophy, a professor of Chinese, and the Chairman, who was a professor of ancient Greek! That one rang bells.

On the machine now everything is done except the oil change. I wake Chris and we pack and go. He's still sleepy but the cold air on the road wakes him up.

The piney road goes upward, and there's not so much traffic this morning. The rocks among the pines are dark and volcanic. I wonder if that was volcanic dust we slept in. Is there such a thing as volcanic dust? Chris says he's hungry and I am too.

At La Pine we stop. I tell Chris to order me ham and eggs for breakfast while I stay outside to change the oil.

At a filling station next to the restaurant I pick up a quart of oil, and in a gravelly lot back of the restaurant remove the drain plug, let the oil drain, replace the plug, add the new oil, and when I'm done the new oil on the dipstick shines in the sunlight almost as clear and colorless as water. Ahhhhh!

I repack the wrench, enter the restaurant and see Chris and, on the table, my breakfast. I head into the washroom, clean up and return.

"Am I hungry!" he says.

"It was a cold night," I say. "We burned up a lot of food just staying alive."

The eggs are good. The ham too. Chris talks about the dream and how it frightened him and then that's done with. He looks as though he's about to ask a question, then doesn't, then stares out the window into the pines for a while, then comes back with it.

"Dad?"

"What?"

"Why are we doing this?"

"What?"

"Just riding all the time."

"Just to see the country -- vacation."

The answer doesn't seem to satisfy him. But he can't seem to say what's wrong with it.

A sudden despair wave hits, like that at dawn. I lie to him. That's what's wrong.

"We just keep going and going," he says.

"Sure. What would you rather do?"

He has no answer.

I don't either.

On the road an answer comes that we're doing the highest Quality thing I can think of right now, but that wouldn't satisfy him any more than what I told him. I don't know what else I could have said. Sooner or later, before we say goodbye, if that's how it goes, we'll have to do some talking. Shielding him like this from the past may be doing him more harm than good. He'll have to hear about Phædrus, although there's much he can never know. Particularly the end.

Phædrus arrived at the University of Chicago already in a world of thought so different from the one you or I understand, it would be difficult to relate, even if I fully remembered everything. I know that the acting chairman admitted him during the Chairman's absence on the basis of his teaching experience and apparent ability to converse intelligently. What he actually said is lost. Afterward he waited for a number of weeks for the Chairman to return in hopes of obtaining a scholarship, but when the Chairman did appear an interview took place which consisted essentially of one question and no answer.

The Chairman said, "What is your substantive field?"

Phædrus said, "English composition."

The Chairman bellowed, "That is a methodological field!" And for all practical purposes that was the end of the interview. After some inconsequential conversation Phædrus stumbled, hesitated and excused himself, then went back to the mountains. This was the characteristic of his that had failed him out of the University before. He had gotten stuck on a question and hadn't been able to think about anything else, while the classes moved on without him. This time, however, he had all summer to think about why his field should be substantive or methodological, and all that summer that is what he did.

In the forests near the timberline he ate Swiss cheese, slept on pine-bough beds, drank mountain stream water and thought about Quality and substantive and methodological fields.

Substance doesn't change. Method contains no permanence. Substance relates to the form of the atom. Method relates to what the atom does. In technical composition a similar distinction exists between physical description and functional description. A complex assembly is best described first in terms of its substances: its subassemblies and parts. Then, next, it is described in terms of its methods: its functions as they occur in sequence. If you confuse physical and functional description, substance and method, you get all tangled up and so does the reader.

But to apply these classifications to a whole field of knowledge such as English composition seemed arbitrary and impractical. No academic discipline is without both substantive and methodological aspects. And Quality had no connection that he could see with either one of them. Quality isn't a substance. Neither is it a method. It's outside of both. If one builds a house using the plumb-line and spirit-level methods he does so because a straight vertical wall is less likely to collapse and thus has higher Quality than a crooked one. Quality isn't method. It's the goal toward which method is aimed.

"Substance" and "substantive" really corresponded to "object" and "objectivity," which he'd rejected in order to arrive at a nondualistic concept of Quality. When everything is divided up into substance and method, just as when everything's divided up into subject and object, there's really no room for Quality at all. His thesis not be a part of a substantive field, because to accept a split into substantive and methodological was to deny the existence of Quality. If Quality was going to stay, the concept of substance and method would have to go. That would mean a quarrel with the committee, something he had no desire for at all. But he was angry that they should destroy the entire meaning of what he was saying with the very first question. Substantive field? What kind of Procrustean bed were they trying to shove him into? he wondered.

He decided to examine more closely the background of the committee and did some library digging for this purpose. He felt this committee was off into some entirely alien pattern of thought. He didn't see where this pattern and the large pattern of his own thought joined together.

He was especially disturbed by the quality of the explanations of the committee's purpose. They seemed extremely confusing. The entire description of the committee's work was a strange pattern of ordinary enough words put together in a most unordinary way, so that the explanation seemed far more complex than the thing he was trying to have explained. This wasn't the bells ringing he'd heard before.

He studied everything he could find that the Chairman had written and here again was found the strange pattern of language seen in the confusing description of the committee. It was a puzzling style because it was completely different from what he'd seen of the Chairman himself. The Chairman, in a brief interview, had impressed him with great quickness of mind, and an equally swift temper. And yet here was one of the most ambiguous, inscrutable styles Phædrus had ever read. Here were encyclopedic sentences that left subject and predicate completely out of shouting distance. Parenthetic elements were unexplainably inserted inside other parenthetic elements, equally unexplainably inserted into sentences whose relevance to the preceding sentences in the reader's mind was dead and buried and decayed long before the arrival of the period.

But most remarkable of all were the wondrous and unexplained proliferations of abstract categories that seemed freighted with special meanings that never got stated and whose content could only be guessed at; these piled one after another so fast and so close that Phædrus knew he had no possible way of understanding what was before him, much less take issue with it.

At first Phædrus presumed the reason for the difficulty was that all this was over his head. The articles assumed a certain basic learning which he didn't have. Then, however, he noticed that some of the articles were written for audiences that couldn't possibly have this background, and this hypothesis was weakened.

His second hypothesis was that the Chairman was a "technician," a phrase he used for a writer so deeply involved in his field that he'd lost the ability to communicate with people outside. But if this wereso, why was the committee given such a general, nontechnical title as "Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods"? And the Chairman didn't have the personality of a technician. So that hypothesis was weak too.

In time, Phædrus abandoned the labor of pounding his head against the Chairman's rhetoric and tried to discover more about the background of the committee, hoping that would explain what this was all about. This, it turned out, was the correct approach. He began to see what his trouble was.

The Chairman's statements were guarded...guarded by enormous, labyrinthine fortifications that went on and on with such complexity and massiveness it was almost impossible to discover what in the world it was inside them he was guarding. The inscrutability of all this was the kind of inscrutability you have when you suddenly enter a room where a furious argument has just ended. Everyone is quiet. No one is talking.

I have one tiny fragment of Phædrus standing in the stone corridor of a building, evidently within the University of Chicago, addressing the assistant chairman of the committee, like a detective at the end of a movie, saying: "In your description of the committee, you have omitted one important name."

"Yes?" says the assistant chairman.

"Yes," says Phædrus omnisciently, " -- Aristotle -- "

The assistant chairman is shocked for a moment, then, almost like a culprit who has been discovered but feels no guilt, laughs loud and long.

"Oh, I see," he says. "You didn't know -- anything about. -- " Then he thinks better of what he is going to say and decides not to say anything more.

We arrive at the turnoff to Crater Lake and go up a neat road into the National Park...clean, tidy and preserved. It really shouldn't be any other way, but this doesn't win any prizes for Quality either. It turns it into a museum. This is how it was before the white man came...beautiful lava flows, and scrawny trees, and not a beer can anywhere...but now that the white man is here, it looks fake. Maybe the National Park Service should set just one pile of beer cans in the middle of all that lava and then it would come to life. The absence of beer cans is distracting.

At the lake we stop and stretch and mingle affably with the small crowd of tourists holding cameras and children yelling, "Don't go too close!" and see cars and campers with all different license plates, and see the Crater Lake with a feeling of "Well, there it is," just as the pictures show. I watch the other tourists, all of whom seem to have out-of-place looks too. I have no resentment at all this, just a feeling that it's all unreal and that the quality of the lake is smothered by the fact that it's so pointed to. You point to something as having Quality and the Quality tends to go away. Quality is what you see out of the corner of your eye, and so I look at the lake below but feel the peculiar quality from the chill, almost frigid sunlight behind me, and the almost motionless wind.

"Why did we come here?" Chris says.

"To see the lake."

He doesn't like this. He senses falseness and frowns deep, trying to find the right question to expose it. "I just hate this," he says.

A tourist lady looks at him with surprise, then resentment.

"Well, what can we do, Chris?" I ask. "We just have to keep going until we find out what's wrong or find out why we don't know what's wrong. Do you see that?"

He doesn't answer. The lady pretends not to be listening, but her motionlessness reveals that she is. We walk toward the motorcycle, and I try to think of something, but nothing comes. I see he's crying a little and now looks away to prevent me from seeing it.

We wind down out of the park to the south.

I said the assistant chairman for the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods was shocked. What he was so shocked about was that Phædrus didn't know he was at the locus of what is probably the most famous academic controversy of the century, what a California university president described as the last attempt in history to change the course of an entire university.

Phædrus' reading turned up a brief history of that famous revolt against empirical education that had taken place in the early thirties. The Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods was a vestige of that attempt. The leaders of the revolt were Robert Maynard Hutchins, who had become president of the University of Chicago; Mortimer Adler, whose work on the psychological background of the law of evidence was somewhat similar to work being done at Yale by Hutchins; Scott Buchanan, a philosopher and mathematician; and most important of all for Phædrus, the present chairman of the committee, who was then a Columbia University Spinozist and medievalist.

Adler's study of evidence, cross-fertilized by a reading of classics of the Western world, resulted in a conviction that human wisdom had advanced relatively little in recent times. He consistently harked back to St. Thomas Aquinas, who had taken Plato and Aristotle and made them part of his medieval synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian faith. The work of Aquinas and of the Greeks, as interpreted by Aquinas, was to Adler the capstone of the Western intellectual heritage. Therefore they provided a measuring rod for anyone seeking the good books.

In the Aristotelian tradition as interpreted by the medieval scholastics, man is counted a rational animal, capable of seeking and defining the good life and achieving it. When this "first principle" about the nature of man was accepted by the president of the University of Chicago, it was inevitable that it would have educational repercussions. The famous University of Chicago Great Books program and the reorganization of the University structure along Aristotelian lines and the establishment of the "College," in which a reading of classics was initiated in fifteen-year-old students, were some of the results.

Hutchins had rejected the idea that an empirical scientific education could automatically produce a "good" education. Science is "value free." The inability of science to grasp Quality, as an object of enquiry, makes it impossible for science to provide a scale of values.

Adler and Hutchins were concerned fundamentally with the "oughts" of life, with values, with Quality and with the foundations of Quality in theoretical philosophy. Thus they had apparently been traveling in the same direction as Phædrus but had somehow ended with Aristotle and stopped there.

There was a clash.

Even those who were willing to admit Hutchins' preoccupation with Quality were unwilling to grant the final authority to the Aristotelian tradition to define values. They insisted that no values can be fixed, and that a valid modern philosophy need not reckon with ideas as they are expressed in the books of ancient and medieval times. The whole business seemed to many of them merely a new and pretentious jargon of weasel concepts.

Phædrus didn't know quite what to make of this clash. But it certainly seemed to be close to the area he wished to work in. He also felt that no values can be fixed but that this is no reason why values should be ignored or that values do not exist as reality. He also felt antagonistic to the Aristotelian tradition as a definer of values, but he didn't feel this tradition should be left unreckoned with. The answer to all this was somehow deeply enmeshed in it and he wanted to know more.

Of the four who had created such a furor, the present chairman of the committee was the only one now left. Perhaps because of this reduction in rank, perhaps for other reasons, his reputation among persons Phædrus talked to wasn't one of geniality. His geniality was confirmed by none and sharply refuted by two, one the head of a major University department who described him as a "holy terror" and another who held a graduate degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago who said the chairman was well known for graduating only carbon copies of himself. Neither of these advisers was by nature vindictive and Phædrus felt what they said was true. This was further confirmed by a discovery made at the department office. He wanted to talk to two graduates of the committee to find out more of what it was about, and had been told that the committee had granted only two Ph.D.'s in its history. Apparently to find room in the sun for a reality of Quality he would have to fight and overcome the head of his own committee, whose Aristotelian outlook made it impossible even to get started and whose temperament appeared to be extremely intolerant of opposing ideas. It all added up to a very gloomy picture.

He then sat down and penned, to the Chairman of the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Methods at the University of Chicago, a letter which can only be described as a provocation to dismissal, in which the writer refuses to skulk quietly out the back door but instead creates a scene of such proportions the opposition is forced to throw him out the front door, thus giving weight to the provocation it didn't formerly have. Afterward he picks himself up out of the street and, after making sure the door is completely closed, shakes his fist at it, dusts himself off and says, "Oh well, I tried," and in this way absolves his conscience.

Phædrus' provocation informed the Chairman that his substantive field was now philosophy, not English composition. However, he said, the division of study into substantive and methodological fields was an outgrowth of the Aristotelian dichotomy of form and substance, which nondualists had little use for, the two being identical.

He said he wasn't sure, but the thesis on Quality appeared to turn into an anti-Aristotelian thesis. If this was true he had chosen an appropriate place to present it. Great Universities proceeded in a Hegelian fashion and any school which could not accept a thesis contradicting its fundamental tenets was in a rut. This, Phædrus claimed, was the thesis the University of Chicago was waiting for.

He admitted the claim was grandiose and that value judgments were actually impossible for him to make since no person could be an impartial judge of his own cause. But if someone else were to produce a thesis which purported to be a major breakthrough between Eastern and Western philosophy, between religious mysticism and scientific positivism, he would think it of major historic importance, a thesis which would place the University miles ahead. In any event, he said, no one was really accepted in Chicago until he'd rubbed someone out. It was time Aristotle got his.

Just outrageous.

And not just provocation to dismissal either. What comes through even more strongly is megalomania, delusions of grandeur, of complete loss of ability to understand the effect of what he was saying on others. He had become so caught up in his own world of Quality metaphysics he couldn't see outside it anymore, and since no one else understood this world, he was already done for.

I think he must have felt at the time that what he was saying was true and it didn't matter if his manner or presentation was outrageous or not. There was so much to it he didn't have time for prettying it up. If the University of Chicago was interested in the esthetics of what he was saying rather than the rational content, they were failing their fundamental purpose as a University.

This was it. He really believed. It wasn't just another interesting idea to be tested by existing rational methods. It was a modification of the existing rational methods themselves. Normally when you have a new idea to present in an academic environment you're supposed to be objective and disinterested in it. But this idea of Quality took issue with that very supposition...of objectivity and disinterestedness. These were mannerisms appropriate only to dualistic reason. Dualistic excellence is achieved by objectivity, but creative excellence is not.

He had the faith that he had solved a huge riddle of the universe, cut a Gordian knot of dualistic thought with one word, Quality, and he wasn't about to let anyone tie that word down again. And in believing, he couldn't see how outrageously megalomaniacal his words sounded to others. Or if he saw it, didn't care. What he said was megalomaniacal, but suppose it was true? If he was wrong, who would care? But suppose he was right? To be right and throw it away in order to please the predilections of his teachers, that would be the monstrosity!

And so he just did not care how he sounded to others. It was a totally fanatic thing. He lived in a solitary universe of discourse in those days. No one understood him. And the more people showed how they failed to understand him and disliked what they did understand, the more fanatic and unlikable he became.

His provocation to dismissal was given an expected reception. Since his substantive field was philosophy, he should apply to the philosophy department, not the committee.

Phædrus dutifully did this, then he and his family loaded their car and trailer with all they owned and said goodbye to their friends and were about to start. Just as he locked the doors of the house for the last time the mailman appeared with a letter. It was from the University of Chicago. It said he was not admitted there. Nothing more.

Obviously the Chairman of the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods had influenced the decision.

Phædrus borrowed some stationery from the neighbors and wrote back to the Chairman that since he had already been admitted to the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods he would have to remain there. This was a rather legalistic maneuver, but Phædrus by this time had developed a kind of combative canniness. This deviousness, the quick shuffle out the philosophy door seemed to indicate that the Chairman for some reason was unable to throw him out the front door of the committee, even with that outrageous letter in hand, and that gave Phædrus some confidence. No side doors, please. They were going to have to throw him out the front door or not at all. Maybe they wouldn't be able to. Good. He wanted this thesis not to owe anyone anything.

We travel down the eastern shore of Klamath Lake on a three-lane highway that contains a lot of nineteen- twenties feeling. That's when these three-laners were all made. We pull in for lunch at a roadhouse which belongs to this era too. Wooden frame badly in need of paint, neon beer signs in the window, gravel and engine drippings for a front lawn.

Inside, the toilet seat is cracked and the washbowl is covered with grease streaks, but on my way back to our booth I take a second look at the owner behind the bar. A nineteen-twenties face. Uncomplicated, uncool and unbowed. This is his castle. We're his guests. And if we don't like his hamburgers we'd better shut up.

When they arrive, the hamburgers, with giant raw onions, are tasty and the bottle beer is fine. A whole meal for a lot less than you'd pay at one of those old-ladies places with plastic flowers in the window. As we eat I see on the map we've taken a wrong turn way back and could have gotten to the ocean much quicker by another route. It's hot now, a West Coast sticky hotness which after the Western Desert hotness is very depressing. Really, this is just transported East, all of this scene, and I'd like to get to the ocean where it's cool as soon as possible.

I think about this all around the southern shore of Klamath Lake. Sticky hotness and nineteen-twenties funk. -- That was the feeling of Chicago that summer.

When Phædrus and his family arrived in Chicago, he took up residence near the University and, since he had no scholarship, began full-time teaching of rhetoric at the University of Illinois, which was then downtown at Navy Pier, sticking out into the lake, funky and hot.

Classes were different from those in Montana. The top high-school students had been skimmed off to the Champaign and Urbana campuses and almost all the students he taught were a solid monotonous C. When their papers were judged in class for Quality it was hard to distinguish among them. Phædrus, in other circumstances, probably would have invented something to get around this, but now this was just bread-and-butter work for which he couldn't spare creative energy. His interest lay to the south at the other University.

He entered the University of Chicago registration lineup, announced his name to the registering Professor of Philosophy and noticed a slight setting of the eyes. The Professor of Philosophy said, Oh, yes, the Chairman had asked that he be registered in an Ideas and Methods course which the Chairman himself was teaching, and give him the schedule of the course. Phædrus noted that the time set for the class conflicted with his schedule at Navy Pier and chose instead another one, Ideas and Methods 251, Rhetoric. Since rhetoric was his own field, he felt a little more at home here. And the lecturer wasn't the Chairman. The lecturer was the Professor of Philosophy now registering him. The Professor of Philosophy's eyes, formerly set, now became wide.

Phædrus returned to his teaching at Navy Pier and his reading for his first class. It was now absolutely necessary that he study as he had never studied before to learn the thought of Classic Greece in general and of one Classic Greek in particular...Aristotle.

Of all the thousands of students at the University of Chicago who had studied the ancient classics it's doubtful that there was ever a more dedicated one. The main struggle of the University's Great Books program was against the modern belief that the classics had nothing of any real importance to say to a twentieth-century society. To be sure, the majority of students taking the courses must have played the game of nice manners with their teachers, and accepted, for purposes of understanding, the prerequisite belief that the ancients had something meaningful to say. But Phædrus, playing no games at all, didn't just accept this idea. He passionately and fanatically knew it. He came to hate them vehemently, and to assail them with every kind of invective he could think of, not because they were irrelevant but for exactly the opposite reason. The more he studied, the more convinced he became that no one had yet told the damage to this world that had resulted from our unconscious acceptance of their thought.

Around the southern shore of Klamath Lake we pass through some suburban-type development, and then leave the lake to the west, toward the coast. The road goes up now into the forests of huge trees not at all like the rain-starved forests we've been through. Huge Douglas firs are on either side of the road. On the cycle we can look up along their trunks, straight up, for hundreds of feet as we pass between them. Chris wants to stop and walk among them and so we stop.

While he goes for a walk I lean my back as carefully as possible against a big slab of Douglas fir bark and look up and try to remember. --

The details of what he learned are lost now, but from events that occurred later I know he absorbed tremendous quantities of information. He was capable of doing this on a near-photographic basis. To understand how he arrived at his condemnation of the Classic Greeks it's necessary to review in summary form the "mythos over logos" argument, which is well known to scholars of Greek and is often a cause of fascination with that area of study.

The term logos, the root word of "logic," refers to the sum total of our rational understanding of the world. Mythos is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos. The mythos includes not only the Greek myths but the Old Testament, the Vedic Hymns and the early legends of all cultures which have contributed to our present world understanding. The mythos-over-logos argument states that our rationality is shaped by these legends, that our knowledge today is in relation to these legends as a tree is in relation to the little shrub it once was. One can gain great insights into the complex overall structure of the tree by studying the much simpler shape of the shrub. There's no difference in kind or even difference in identity, only a difference in size.

Thus, in cultures whose ancestry includes ancient Greece, one invariably finds a strong subject-object differentiation because the grammar of the old Greek mythos presumed a sharp natural division of subjects and predicates. In cultures such as the Chinese, where subject-predicate relationships are not rigidly defined by grammar, one finds a corresponding absence of rigid subject-object philosophy. One finds that in the Judeo-Christian culture in which the Old Testament "Word" had an intrinsic sacredness of its own, men are willing to sacrifice and live by and die for words. In this culture, a court of law can ask a witness to tell "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God," and expect the truth to be told. But one can transport this court to India, as did the British, with no real success on the matter of perjury because the Indian mythos is different and this sacredness of words is not felt in the same way. Similar problems have occurred in this country among minority groups with different cultural backgrounds. There are endless examples of how mythos differences direct behavior differences and they're all fascinating.

The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is.

There is only one kind of person, Phædrus said, who accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phædrus said, is "insane." To go outside the mythos is to become insane. --

My God, that just came to me now. I never knew that before.

He knew! He must have known what was about to happen. It's starting to open up.

You have all these fragments, like pieces of a puzzle, and you can place them together into large groups, but the groups don't go together no matter how you try, and then suddenly you get one fragment and it fits two different groups and then suddenly the two great groups are one. The relation of the mythos to insanity. That's a key fragment. I doubt whether anyone ever said that before. Insanity is the terra incognita surrounding the mythos. And he knew! He knew the Quality he talked about lay outside the mythos.

Now it comes! Because Quality is the generator of the mythos. That's it. That's what he meant when he said, "Quality is the continuing stimulus which causes us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it." Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side...that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That's why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.

I see Chris returning through the trees now. He looks relaxed and happy. He shows me a piece of bark and asks if he can save it as a souvenir. I haven't been fond of loading the cycle with these bits and pieces he finds and will probably throw away when he gets home, but this time say okay anyway.

After a few minutes the road reaches a summit and then drops steeply into a valley that becomes more exquisite as we descend. I never thought I would call a valley that...exquisite...but there's something about this whole coastal country so different from any other mountainous region in America that it brings out the word. Here, a little farther south, is where all our good wine comes from. The hills are somehow tucked and folded differently...exquisitely. The road twists and banks and curlecues and descends and we and the cycle smoothly roll with it, following it in a separate grace of our own, almost touching the waxen leaves of shrubs and overhanging boughs of trees. The firs and rocks of the higher country are behind us now and around us are soft hills and vines and purple and red flowers, fragrance mixed with woodsmoke up from the distant fog along the valley floor and from beyond that, unseen...a vague scent of ocean. --

-- How can I love all this so much and be insane? --

-- I don't believe it!

The mythos. The mythos is insane. That's what he believed. The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane!

And in Aristotle and the ancient Greeks he believed he had found the villains who had so shaped the mythos as to cause us to accept this insanity as reality.

That. That now. That ties it all together. It feels relieving when that happens. It's so hard sometimes to conjure all this up, a strange sort of exhaustion follows. Sometimes I think I'm just making it up myself. Sometimes I'm not sure. And sometimes I know I'm not. But the mythos and insanity, and the centrality of this...this I'm sure is from him.

When we're through the folded hills we come to Medford and a freeway leading to Grants Pass and it's almost evening. A heavy head wind keeps us just up with traffic on upgrades, even with the throttle wide open. Coming into Grants Pass we hear a frightening, loud, clanking noise and stop to discover that the chain guard has become caught in the chain somehow and now is all torn up. Not too serious, but enough to lay us up for a while to get it replaced. Foolish to replace it, perhaps, when the cycle will be sold in a few days.

Grants Pass looks like a big enough town to have a motorcycle place open the next morning and when we arrive I look for a motel.

We haven't seen a bed since Bozeman, Montana.

We find one with color TV, heated swimming pool, a coffee maker for the next morning, soap, white towels, a shower all tiled and clean beds.

We lie down on the clean beds and Chris just bounces on his for a while. Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.