OK here goes.
The "Afterword is 7 pages long and was written in 1984:
" ... the receding Ancient Greek perspective of the past ten years has a very dark side. Chris is dead.
He was murdered. At about 8:00pm on Saturday November 17th 1979, in San Fransisco, he left the Zen Center, where he was a student, to visit a friend's house a block away on Haight Street.
According to witnesses, a car stopped on the street beside him and two men, black, jumped out. One came from behind him so that Chris couldn't escape, and grabbed his arms. The one in front of him emptied his pockets and found nothing and became angry. He threatened Chris with a large kitchen knife. Chris said something which the witnesses could not hear. His assailant became angrier. Chris then said something that made him even more furious. He jammed the knife into Chris's chest. Then the two jumped into their car and left.
Chris leaned for a time on a parked car, trying to keep from collapsing. After a time he staggered across the street to a lamp at the corner of Haight and Octavia. Then, with his right lung filled with blood from a severed pulmonary artery, he fell to the sidewalk and died."
I must admit that, after ploughing through the book, you do gain a certain affinity with Chris and this ending quite shocked me. I also have an 18 year old son called Chris...
Oh, and the above is Copyright Robert M Pirsig.
