Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig (1974). A book I avoided when I was doing psych nursing, in my thirties. Many of my friends read it and raved about it. I judged it by its title. Now, reading it in my eighties, I realise what I missed, and that if I’d read it and understood it back then, my life might have been simpler. Or perhaps I wasn’t ready for it.
What I can safely say is that if you read it with an open mind, it will either change the way you think or help you to understand why you experience life as you do. Motorcycle maintenance is not really the subject. It is a central metaphor for a way of doing and making, where zen, the state of intuitive attentiveness, is the key to action. The narrative vehicle for this enquiry into how to live is a road trip, a motorcycle journey across America, on which the narrator takes his son and a couple who are good friends. In it, he goes back in time in search of his lost self, and rediscovers the mystery that broke his former life apart.
I won’t try to summarise the mystery here, except to say that it helps me understand why I have difficulty appreciating much modern art. It is because it represents the underlying form of things, which Pirsig calls the Classical viewpoint. My perception is Romantic, that is, I see the appearance… more than that, I see the poetry of things, the sounds, the rhythms, the connections, differences and dissonances. Beyond this dualist divide of objective and subjective, the narrator leads us to the meaning that is beyond, above, outside these viewpoints…. Quality. This, if I can dare to describe the undefinable, is the One before it becomes the Many, the immanent, uncreated desire of life for itself that leads to all creation.
All this is folded into a personal story that is moving and profound and has great beauty (a Romantic word!).
I haven’t finished it yet, but am so inspired by it, I had to write this reflection.
