Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

A Journey of Journeys

As others none the wiser have echoed before me, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig is not a book about motorcycles. But to say that it’s not would also be a faulty assessment. It’s a premise based on the essence of motorcycle maintenance, using the motorcycle as a vehicle for both the journey of a dad and his son across America and the journey Pirsig himself takes you through, one of philosophy and life. It’s a book so profoundly beautiful and frustrating and pedantic and didactic all at the same time that it accomplishes what good books are intended to do—to make you think.

In short, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is unlike any book you’ve read before.

The intoxicating narrative of both literal and figurative journeys functions as Pirsig’s analysis of the rhetoric and dialectic forms of philosophies in the context of modern technology and culture, but that is neither here nor there. It’s not why I became interested and subsequently engrossed in the book, and it’s hard to imagine that most others who stumble upon it by recommendation took away from the book an enlightenment of the philosophical persuasion.

No, it’s something else entirely, but not strictly in the form an overarching message but in bits and pieces of spellbinding prose, in the way Persig articulates the slow and scenic yet disturbing descent of his own mind into existential madness as he expounds the line between the classic and romantic schools of thought, between art and science, and a grand proposition to unite them under the concept of universal Quality.

But while the philosophical underpinnings of the book are quick to fall under the scrutiny of those more philosophically inclined, I looked elsewhere for inspiration, the parts uncontested and brimming with observations so poignant in today’s world.

Romantic and Classic

The time for real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue.

I thought a lot about the central conflict Persig presents in his narrative: that there is a clear schism, one rife with animosity and intolerance, between the romantic, or what we call artistic, and the classic, more commonly known as the scientific. But when you look around, at least in the technology space, it seems that the paradigm has shifted in such a way that art, or rather in its more functional form design, has entered the same playing field as engineering. It’s now harder to hire designers than developers and that is entirely because it is a generally accepted truism that great design complements great engineering, and that despite their inherent differences it’s the union of both that will create lasting value. Perhaps it’s a superficial observation, but it’s one you don’t hear much about in public discourse anymore.

Travel by Motorcycle

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.

Ever since I took a motorcycle class a few years ago I’ve fallen in love with the mode of transportation. In a way it encapsulates the way I want to live life: with a self-convicted sense of risk and thrill, out in the open, not as the observer but as the participant. Those who balk at the idea of owning a motorcycle, much less to travel or commute by one, has obviously never ridden one. Pirsig describes so perfectly what I love about motorcycles in a book that’s not really about motorcycles at all.

Three Ways to Live

Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spirtiual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there’s no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.

You can wait around, follow someone else’s footsteps, or take the road less traveled. I’d like to be one who charts his own course and has enough initiative to do so.

Change Starts with Yourself

The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.

For me this serves as a reminder to start small. Forget ideals about changing the world lest they become delusions of grandeur. Listen to your heart, think with your head, and make with your hands. Things have a way of working out when you stay focused and grounded.

The Cure

My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. It’s very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest. My next favorite is coffee.

This shall be the only rule I abide by for as long as I live.

On Loneliness

We see much more of this loneliness now. It’s paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest… The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness… There’s this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what’s imeediately around them. The media have convinced them that what’s right around them is unimportant. And that’s why they’re lonely.

I’ve written extensively on loneliness as a subject worth exploring, but here Pirsig captures in his words why loneliness has become so pervasive in the post-modern world of hyper urbanization and inundating media influences.

But perhaps the most meaningful perspective Persig draws is this:

Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices — TV, jets, freeways and so on — but I hope it’s been made plain that the real evil isn’t the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It’s the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces evil.

In the years since the media and most of everyone I know have been lampooning our own relationships with technology I have never encountered a passage that captures so perfectly the essence of who’s actually responsible for our predicament, and this was an observation made decades ago, before even cell phones or laptops or the Internet came into the picture. Technology, for better or worse, has always had the capacity to affect us into different modes of being, and it’s coming to light that loneliness seems to be in consequence the most prevalent form.