Category: Fiction

I recall this book as having had a big impact on me during high school, though in looking at the copyright the soonest I would have read it would have been the last semester of my senior year. Looking back, I have only vague recollections of what was striking about it. Three impressions stand out: I remember resonating with the discussion of quality, and the connection between technology and what I then would have called mysticism; the sharpest memory I have remains the revelation, in the middle of the book, about Phaedrus; and many of the descriptions of landscapes and moving through them stayed with me – in particular, there is a passage I hope to encounter again (assuming I did not imagine it), about riding along a road and the landscape dropping away before them and opening a vast vista…

Continue reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig (1974)

Thursday 15 August 2019

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I’m happy to have read it again. I’m surprised at how well it read a second time.

One thing that surprised me was how much I remembered. Not just the core ideas, or the revelation about who Phaedrus was, or the interplay between Chris and his father, but quite a few of the scenes. The descriptions of coming over a rise, and the landscape opening up.

I liked the interplay between the descriptions traveling through the landscape, and the conceptual work — the Chataqua — that was being done. It was not too tight, not lockstep, but every now and then there were correspondences that resonated. The transition from the midwest, where the landscape was ordered out of value, to the west, where the untidyness of the land reflected its loss of value. The high country with its clarity and deliniation, with the abstraction of ideas about quality. The parallel for riding upwards through the valley and coming to the source of the river, and the upward path to the root of the ideas.

Continue reading Zen and the Art: Short review