While I see where both of them are going here, I still cannot entirely agree. I am a firm believer that we cannot be just one of the two, but that we are all a little bit of each (classic and romantic, serious and rhetorical) in certain moments. I find that people tend to fulfill the roles that people need them to fulfill at a given point in time, and in doing so they can switch between classical and romantic based on the situation they've been placed in. I think that rhetoricus has the full potential to step in seriosus' shoes and take a peek from the serious man's point of view, and that think that seriosus (while being entirely resistant to stepping in the rhetorical man's shoes) could do the same. We may have the tendency to see from one side more frequently, but I don't believe that we are firmly just one and not the other.
So like Kaylee, I can't quite wrap my mind around why it is common practice to not only limit people to two categories of people, but also to place the "two" types of people in contrast with each other. I find that this is one of the greater struggles I have with considering this part of rhetoric. In fact, on page 82, Pirsig writes "Once we have a handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife. We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts." My immediate response to that was to write in my purple pen, "But what about the people who see the gray?" By this I mean, that I simply don't understand why it has to be just one thing or another. Yes, there is a great divide between black and white, and yes they sit on opposite ends of a spectrum, but that's just it--they are on a spectrum.
Take this gradation between black on the left and white on the right, there are infinite variations of grey that fall between the two extremities. If things have to be "black and white" as Pirsig puts it, then why are there so many varying shades of grey that make up the space between black and white? I simply cannot believe that the two colors would be opposites if there weren't middle group in which people could fall near or far or smack in the middle of the two ends. Furthermore, why do we so often choose to ignore them when talking about the way people look at the world? It's almost as if we purposefully turn a blind eye to the existence of the gray area.
I feel like this is at least a little bit of what I took from Kim's post. It's as if we can immediately label people as Type A or Type B, but in reality they are not always all Type A or always all Type B. Each person can have natural tendencies toward one or the other but they are not always one way in every situation. We can be both logical and artistic. We can exist within ourselves as both a thinker and a doer. And sometimes to most compelling people we encounter are the ones who hold what we personally deem the best qualities from either side, classic and romantic. I know that this probably sounds redundant to what I said last week--about how not every rhetorical situation calls for the same response--but that's simply how I currently understand the way of the world and the way of rhetoric.
Also, Kaylee, I also adored the quote from page 42, "Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousand and thousands of these ghosts from the past." It's both chilling and inspiring, although I can't quite say I understand exactly what Pirsig is getting at in his narrative on the whole just yet. We shall see.
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