Books |
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert Pirsig
By
Published: Dec 05, 2018
Category:
Memoir
This book was published in 1974. The author died in 2017. Does anyone remember his name? Or even, for that matter, the name of his book, which sold millions of copies and is often described as “the most important book I ever read?”
Robert Pirsig was off-the-charts smart — he enrolled at the University of Minnesota to study biochemistry when he was 14 — and flunked out a few years later. The surface cause of his distress: the number of problem-solving hypotheses seemed unlimited. In 1963, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized. His book is a fictionalized memoir of a cross-country trip he took in 1968 with his 11-year-old son and two friends. As he explained it, “The book should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles, either. The motorcycle is mainly a mental phenomenon. People who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this. A study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.” Hint: Rationality and magic — are they really opposites?
—-
Robert Pirsig and his young son are traveling across America with friends on two large motorcycles. Almost immediately something goes wrong with their friends’ cycle. The man does not understand the problem, and, in his eagerness to fix it quickly, he makes it worse.
Pirsig’s response is not to give advice. It’s to muse about technology. "All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in a strange land," he writes. "You know there’s an explanation for all this somewhere and what it’s doing undoubtedly serves mankind in some indirect way but that isn’t what you see. What you see is the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs."
A biker-dude having a philosophical moment? Oh, it’s much worse than that. As they ride across America, Pirsig reveals himself to be a deep student and passionate teacher who, some time ago, became obsessed with Ultimate Questions. What is Quality? How do we know it? Attain it? And why is it important?
These are questions about which much has been written — but as in all inquiry, in the end you’ve got to find your own answers. The first time around, Pirsig became "Phaedrus," a Platonic truth-seeker. He came to see that writing according to rules is a bad thing, that rules usually get pasted on after the writing was all done and the crowds are standing around trying to figure out how it happened that way. He understood that "any effort that has self-glorification as its endpoint is bound to end in disaster." He stumbled upon the Tao and learned that "the quality that can be defined is not the Absolute Quality." And with that, he had "broken the code" and all his so-called knowledge fell away and he was left with himself. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
You quickly get that the bike trip, though real, is a metaphor. As Pirsig says, "The real cycle you’re working on is the cycle called yourself." And so it is that as he rides he goes all the way back to the part of his life he has suppressed, when the urge to find the truth of things was so great he no longer paid any attention to anything or anyone else. His ghosts nearly took him then; they threaten to take him again.
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" became an instant cult favorite when it was first published. [Cheery factoid: The Guinness Book of World Records lists " “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” as the bestseller rejected by the greatest number of potential publishers — at least 120.] Like the books of Carlos Casteneda, it took the world we see every day and broke it down into its elements, then reconfigured the pieces in magical ways. It didn’t push an agenda or offer up the answers in a neat seven-day program; it just served up the questions as they occurred.
If the book were an intellectual thriller, it might have had a modest vogue. What has made it a classic is that it shows the consequences of thought as well. The first time around, Pirsig was institutionalized and separated from his son — now he’s in danger of losing him again, maybe forever. Talk about high stakes! So along with the internal dialogue that Pirsig cannot shut off there is also the real-life manner of a relationship with a boy, far from home and completely dependent on a father who may be losing it.
There’s a very satisfying ending. There should be: Father and son worked hard for it. So does the reader — this is a book that challenges you as effectively as a triathlon. It may hurt a bit along the way, but it’s awfully good for you.
