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Quote
Posted Sunday February 18, 2007 at 4:07 pm
(4 years ago)
From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence, chapter 25:
[Our current culture] is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it more acceptable. … Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized foot in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in awhile. It's the style that gets you: technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.
I always figured I didn't like style because I wasn't in style, but I like this explanation better.
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