Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was first published when I was a teenager. I was aware of the book’s unforeseen popularity and countercultural reputation, but it proved too daunting for me at the time. I read it years later, after I had read Blue Highways, and was immediately enthralled with the road trip dimension of the book (Pirsig travels from Minneapolis to San Francisco on his motorcycle, accompanied by his son and some friends—not on the same motorcycle, of course). It’s a compelling journey across the austerely beautiful northern tier of the American West;… show more.

Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is the very first philosophical novel I read and it was one of the first books that interested me in philosophy. This interest has followed me over the course of my life. In Zen, an unidentified protagonist (who is a stand-in for Pirsig) recounts a motorcycle trip he takes with his son. Zen is interspersed with the unidentified protagonist’s discussion of Plato, namely Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, which is also the name given to the unidentified protagonist’s historical alter-ego: a creative writing teacher who goes insane trying to define… show more.

Not horror at all, but possibly the best and most life-changing book I’ve ever read. It combines how we perceive the world around us with examples of the author’s approach to mechanics, a deep classical understanding and maintenance of his motorcycle and why others might avoid such maintenance. Hard going but should be read by everyone.

In the late 1960s, the author and his son ride a motorcycle across the Northwestern United States. At first it seems like a random, rambling sort of journey, but we soon discover Pirsig is on a mission to reconcile or reunite with a dark persona from the past, a man he calls Phaedrus. Persig uses the road trip as a framing device for his harrowing mental, emotional, and philosophical journey, and he takes us through some winding passages and desperate didactic encounters along the way, building tension like a thriller while giving a discourse in philosophy, questioning the meaning of… show more.

My friend Mandy says she doesn’t believe in conspiracy theories because people aren’t that organised. Admittedly, governments have acted in lockstep recently but Robert M. Pirsig would agree with her—and if you’ve ever been stuck on hold for over an hour only to be cut off, problem unresolved, you’d agree with him! In Plato’s day, the world was mostly run by warlords with just a dash of democracy. Pirsig complains of sloppy mechanics too intent on the radio to care about his engine noise. Nowadays the world is run by precariously-employed hungover teens squinting at their drying nail varnish while… show more.

State-enforced electric shock treatment to the brain has split the personality of the narrator into the dual-identity of Phaedrus the wolf, and the conforming alter-ego man. Based on the reality of Pirsig's own ascent/descent into either the heights of Satori freedom, or the depths of disjointed madness, depending on one's point of view, this detective story of the mind became a 1974 bestseller. Spiritual freedom, represented here, is attained by evading the splits and schisms, daring the 'modern heresy of insanity,' and merging in whichever moments one can with the All-Unifying One on the healing mountain heights usually too high… show more.

I’ll be honest, this book was a hard read for me the first time through. Parts seemed to drag on and on, but the book never left my head. The ideas in it kept calling me back. Years later I decided to read it again and was shocked at how easily it read and how much I missed the first time. I am feeling a calling to read it again. To me, that is what a great book should do. If a reader closed a book cover and never thinks about that book again, the author failed. A great book… show more.

Work! It’s one of the most neglected topics in literature, and yet it’s what most of us spend our lives doing, trying to create something where there was nothing. How can we make it meaningful? Pirsig shows us that by investing ourselves in the most ordinary activities we shape the shapeless world, and ourselves, into something transcendent, if only briefly. His keyword is “quality,” by which he means the essential whatness of things: What they are is what we make of them, and in doing so, we make ourselves, in work that is never finished.

Zen came out when I was a teenager, when it took the world by storm. It still holds up as a compelling story of an independent-thinking father and his son taking a cross-country motorcycle trip and as “an inquiry into values,” as Pirsig subtitles the book. This book contains multitudes. It makes you think about the nature of genius and mental illness while making you ask yourself, “what is quality?” and how does our consideration of quality affect the meaning of our personal lives. Reading this book helps us see how much we are shaped by our culture and how… show more.

My sailor husband and I both read this book in the early 1970s when we were living on a romantic, leaky 48-foot Fire Island ferryboat that he talked me into buying in our twenties. The book depicts Pirsig’s cross-country motorcycle trip with his teenaged son, with whom he’s had trouble connecting. They learn about each other and themselves on the journey, and Pirsig, a philosophy professor, discourses eloquently about classical vs. romantic approaches to life. My husband and I named our second boat after Pirsig’s alter ego, Phaedrus, whose search for a higher quality of life drove him insane. I… show more.