Lila

Lila Blewitt - a strange name for a very ordinary lady in a very extrordinary book. Lila (pronounced with a hard I as in lilac) is unwittingly the star of Robert Pirsig's follow-up to Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance. After the ZMM journey across the US on a motorcycle, Phaedrus - for he it is - travels here by boat down the Hudson River.

Lila in Sanscrit means "the game of the world", and that may be a clue to what follows. Phaedrus's challenge is to reconcile the dull Lila to the "game of the world" - something described as oscillating continuously between "imbroglio" - a complicated and embarrassing state of things and her "incanto" or spell.

So much has been written about the difficult area of the metaphysics of quality, that the many other qualities of this book are largely ignored.