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Summary
Summary
THE CLASSIC BOOK THAT HAS INSPIRED MILLIONS
A penetrating examination of how we live and how to live better
Few books transform a generation and then establish themselves as touchstones for the generations that follow. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one such book. This modern epic of a man's search for meaning became an instant bestseller on publication in 1974, acclaimed as one of the most exciting books in the history of American letters. It continues to inspire millions.
A narration of a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions on how to live. The narrator's relationship with his son leads to a powerful self-reckoning; the craft of motorcycle maintenance leads to an austerely beautiful process for reconciling science, religion, and humanism. Resonant with the confusions of existence, this classic is a touching and transcendent book of life.
This new edition contains an interview with Pirsig and letters and documents detailing how this extraordinary book came to be.
Author Notes
Robert Maynard Pirsig was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on September 6, 1928. While serving in the Army, he visited Japan on a leave and became interested in Zen Buddhism. After his service, he received bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism from the University of Minnesota. He later studied philosophy at the University of Chicago and at Banaras Hindu University in India. He taught writing at Montana State University in Bozeman and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was also a freelance writer and editor for corporate publications and technical magazines.
His first novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, was published in 1974. His follow-up novel, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, was published in 1991. He died on April 24, 2017 at the age of 88.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Guardian Review
Even at 60 miles an hour, the wind is warm as I weave the bike along the roads less travelled towards the Dakota mountains. I am channelling the universe, at one with my megalomania, as my 12-year-old son, Chris, hangs on for grim death. "Why are we doing this?" he asks later that evening at the campsite. "To showcase my brilliance," I reply. "I'd rather go to Disneyworld." "That's because you are driven by your ego." I read a few pages of Thoreau out loud because it is so much more important for Chris to hear something he does not understand, before checking through my rucksack for the 17th time that day and tinkering with the spark-plugs. John and Sylvia, who arrived ahead of us, come over for a chat. "My bike is making an odd noise," he says. "You need to adjust the tappets, novice," I declare. I am wasting my valuable breath, so I began the first of what I grandiosely call my Chautauqua - my philosophical digressions. John and Sylvia are romantics, terrified by modern technology and unwilling to engage with the dualism of the carburettor-points split. While I tend towards the more rational classical position, I have also learned to view the world through my all-seeing Middle Eye of the Buddha. Sylvia nudges John awake and suggests we get something to eat. "I don't feel well," Chris says. "You will never feel well until you subsume your egotism to mine," I snap. "Now sod off while I amaze myself with my genius." After he had made his way snivelling to his tent, I launch into yet another fascinating Chautauqua on the a priori presumption of a motorcycle before explaining to John that the doctor had diagnosed Chris with a severe mental illness. "I'm not surprised with you as a Dad," John mutters. "That's the typical response of the Unenlightened Romantic," I reply, levitating with the self-congratulation of the logic of my Oneness. My Chautauquas accelerate with increasing intensity and depth as I expose the internal fallacies of Newtonian physics and pour scorn on the solipsistic abyss of the ramblings of Hegel and Hume. I adjust the fuel-flow to harmonise the bike with the altitude and, as we pull into Bozeman, John and Sylvia inexplicably decide to head off on their own. I realise later I could have done more to flesh out their characters, but to have done so would have been to give them an existence independent of my own which, dialectically speaking, would have negated their reality as I alone am the Maker. The ghost of Phaedrus hangs heavy but I take refuge in Mu, where existence and non-existence meet in Japanese Nothingness. I take Chris to meet DeWeese, a former colleague at the Bozeman campus where I taught. "I'm bored," Chris yawns. "I'm doing this for the benefit of your ego," I snap tetchily. Who is Phaedrus? I hear you ask. He is my alter ego, the Searcher I once was before I was crushed by a world that was not ready for my IQ and was forced to undergo electro-convulsive therapy. The Spirit of Chautauqua strengthens as Aquarius aligns with Mars amid the acid casualties Imagined Enlightenment and Phaedrus addresses his students. "How can we know the Meaning of Quality?" he enquires rhetorically. "Quality is of itself, something we all intuitively know. So I'm going to stop marking your essays." "Isn't that a peculiarly narrow, US-centric view?" no one says. "For is not the idea of Quality culturally relative?" "You are too clever to teach at Bozeman," the Dean declares. "Grow a beard and go to Chicago." Exhausted by the originality of my latest Chautauqua, I race Chris to the summit of a desolate Montana peak. "I'm scared," he says. "It's your ego that makes you such a wuss." Phaedrus distils the canon of western philosophical thought, showing up Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Nietzsche, Poincare and the rest of them for the brainless halfwits they undoubtedly are as he tap-dances through the conundra of the substantive and methodological fields to emerge in the Elysian fields of Zen, where Quality is undefinable, yet self-evident. "But surely for something to be self-evident yet undefinable is a logical contradiction in terms," Chris says, scratching his head, searching hopelessly for some self-evident Quality in the book. "Your ego is still blinding you to the truth," I say. "Do you not realise that Phaedrus is Greek for Wolf?" "Um, no it isn't," he answers. "It is if I say it is. OK, buddy?" I change the oil and tinker with the chain for several days before we complete our journey to the Pacific coast. I sense that memories of Phaedrus are tormenting Chris in his sleep and I long to merge our three selves in a Monist Trinity. We symbolically remove our helmets for the first time, high on the cliff overlooking the Ocean. The voice of Phaedrus weakens, the Socratic dialectic finally resolved in a half-arsed, pseudo-intellectual mish-mash of western and eastern philosophy. I take Chris in my arms. "Close your eyes, my son, and soar with me beyond the world of Kant." "You'll always be a Kant to me, Dad." John Crace's Digested Reads appear in G2 on Tuesdays. Caption: article-DigZen.1 "How can we know the Meaning of Quality?" he enquires rhetorically. "Quality is of itself, something we all intuitively know. So I'm going to stop marking your essays." "Isn't that a peculiarly narrow, US-centric view?" no one says. "For is not the idea of Quality culturally relative?" "Your ego is still blinding you to the truth," I say. "Do you not realise that Phaedrus is Greek for Wolf?" - John Crace.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance An Inquiry Into Values Chapter One I can see by my watch without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning. The wind, even at sixty miles an hour, is warm and humid. When it's this hot and muggy at eight-thirty, I'm wondering what it's going to be like in the afternoon. In the wind are pungent odors from the marshes by the road. We are in an area of the Central Plains filled with thousands of duck hunting sloughs, heading northwest from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas. This highway is an old concrete two-laner that hasn't had much traffic since a four-laner went in parallel to it several years ago. When we pass a marsh the air suddenly becomes cooler. Then, when we are past, it suddenly warms up again. I'm happy to be riding back into this country. It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that. Tensions disappear along old roads like this. We bump along the beat-up concrete between the cattails and stretches of meadow and then more cattails and marsh grass. Here and there is a stretch of open water and if you look closely you can see wild ducks at the edge of the cattails. And turtles. . . . There's a red-winged blackbird. I whack Chris's knee and point to it, "What!" he hollers. "Blackbird!" He says something I don't hear. "What?" I holler back. He grabs the back of my helmet and hollers up, "I've seen lots of those, Dad!" "Oh!" I holler back. Then I nod. At age eleven you don't get very impressed with red-winged blackbirds. You have to get older for that. For me this is all mixed with memories that he doesn't have. Cold mornings long ago when the marsh grass had turned brown and cattails were waving in the northwest wind. The pungent smell then was from muck stirred up by hip boots while we were getting in position for the sun to come up and the duck season to open. Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and I could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cat-tails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold. The blackbirds were gone then. But now in July they're back and everything is at its alivest and every foot of these sloughs is humming and cricking and buzzing and chirping, a whole community of millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum. You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it's right there, so blurred you can't focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness. Chris and I are traveling to Montana with some friends riding up ahead, and maybe headed farther than that. Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere. We are just vacationing. Secondary roads are preferred. Paved county roads are the best, state highways are next. Freeways are the worst. We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on "good" rather than "time" and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes. Twisting hilly roads are long in terms of seconds but are much more enjoyable on a cycle where you bank into turns and don't get swung from side to side in any compartment. Roads with little traffic are more enjoyable, as well as safer. Roads free of drive-ins and billboards are better, roads where groves and meadows and orchards and lawns come almost to the shoulder, where kids wave to you when you ride by, where people look from their porches to see who it is, where when you stop to ask directions or information the answer tends to be longer than you want rather than short, where people ask where you're from and how long you've been riding.It was some years ago that my wife and I and our friends first began to catch on to these roads. We took them once in a while for variety or for a shortcut to another main highway, and each time the scenery was grand and we left the road with a feeling of relaxation and enjoyment. We did this time after time before realizing what should have been obvious: these roads are truly different from the main ones. The whole pace of life and personality of the people who live along them are different. They're not going anywhere. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance An Inquiry Into Values . Copyright © by Robert Pirsig. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
