A Quality Book

Here's what happened when I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. And it's not that I went insane.

Thank you to my dear father for giving me this book almost two years ago, on the occasion of my twenty-fourth birthday. I am sorry that it took me so long, but I got around to it. The brain in my head that I used to process the words on each page wouldn’t be there without him in both the literal and the figurative sense.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

At the beginning:

I had to stop halfway through the introduction because Pirsig started talking about the ending. I hate when they do that in the introduction, like they’re assuming everyone who’s reading the book has already read it. I like the way Pirsig writes though. Like he’s very serious but also funny. Like how he hoped his book would be wildly successful when he was writing it but wouldn’t have—couldn’t have—said that out loud. Now that it’s all come true, he doesn’t have to worry about sounding egotistical.

Two chapters in:

Speaking of worry, I’m worried that I’m not going to be able to follow where we’re going. Philosophy makes me nervous even if it is modern and readable philosophy. This book isn’t short! How am I supposed to remember what I’m supposed to remember? Maybe I’m overthinking it. I read 400 page books all the time, and I don’t worry then about remembering what I need to remember.

I continue to like Pirsig’s writing a lot. There’s a distance between the narrator’s internal world and the external world, but as readers, we get to be on the inside. We’re special. I do feel like I’m going to learn some lessons. The narrator’s voice is like that—like he has a lot to teach but it’s all very unassuming. Even though he clearly knows where he’s going—what point he wants to make—he writes like he’s figuring it all out with you. It’s not supposed to be stressful.

I suppose I should mention we are on a motorcycle trip—our unnamed narrator, his son, Chris, and two friends, John and Sylvia. And us. We are traveling west from Minneapolis over the Central Plains. Our narrator explains that what he has in mind for this book is a Chautauqua. This he defines as “an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer.” I’m imagining a cross between a circus and a TED Talk. Maybe there’s a little traveling preacher in there, too.

So far, I’m following, so maybe what I’m actually nervous about is not whether I will be able to understand what I’m reading, but whether or not I will be able to write about what I’m reading. I think I’ll try something a little different. Instead of taking these notes, and turning them into a normal review (whatever that means), I’m just going to leave them as is, and share them with you.¹ Let’s read a book, this book, together.²

In the middle of the third chapter:

Reading this evening, my lover asked if I’m planning on….writing about…this book….??? If I know what I’m getting into? I replied, yes I think so. He said he thinks it might break my brain. Nervousness persists. I like this chapter a lot though.

In a conversation about ghosts, we get this exchange, which made me laugh:

“Why does everybody believe in the law of gravity then?”
“Mass hypnosis. In a very orthodox form know as ‘education.’”

We also get a very ominous ending. Apparently we will be learning about a character named Phaedrus. Who is he? Is he real? Apparently all of the ideas our narrator has shared are stolen from this Phaedrus. Will he want revenge? I will report back.

After Chapter 6:

Pirsig does interesting things with his verbs, switching between active and passive. After our narrator tells John & Sylvia that Chris has been diagnosed with the beginning signs of mental illness, he says “I’m glad they were told…” but he’s the one who told them. Most people would say, “I’m glad I told them.”

I’m learning about the incongruity of a classic mind and a romantic mind, but I’m wondering about that because I think I kind of have both. Maybe. Our narrator says the two modes are fundamentally opposed. A classical mind values facts and parts and how things go together to become something else. It’s about how and why things work. Scientific. A romantic mind is about whether something works or not in the aesthetic sense, and the way you can tell is with your feelings. It is art.

I like understanding how things work from the inside out. When I was little, I used to take apart pens and put them back together. I didn’t end up being the engineer that was hoped for, though. When I got to the part of architecture school where I had to use AutoCAD, I dropped out. If we had continued drafting by hand (though I’ve never been a great artist), I might have stayed. Because beauty. Does it really have to be either or?

Before beginning Part II:

I have found out who Phaedrus is. Or I have been told. But I won’t tell you!!!

This book is definitely heady and out there but there’s an acknowledgment of that fact that helps. After a page and a half of listing out the analytical mechanisms of a motorcycle we are told that the problem with all that is that it’s boring. There’s never too much unloaded at once, and the philosophical exploration is balanced by the details of the motorcycle trip. It’s hot or it’s raining, the landscape is barren or changing. They stop for food and meet a man who used to ride a Henderson. He wants to chat even though it’s one hundred and two degrees. These details that would be pretty mundane in any other book become drivers of forward momentum. Without them I would have to stop actually reading to take a break, and that would be no fun.

Surely, some of the concepts our narrator puts forth won’t fully make sense to me, but I think I understand where we are and where we’re going. What I do understand I like. Also this book makes me want to ride a motorcycle.

Four chapters in to Part II:

Things have slowed down over here. Not in a bad way, I’ve just been busy, so I’m reading more slowly. This is the kind of book that you feel like you need to read in a totally silent room (let’s be real, library), with no distractions for 100 hours. But that’s an unhelpful train of thought. If I didn’t read books when I was busy, I never would read them.

I’m learning about Hume and Kant. Hume believed that all knowledge comes directly and exclusively from the five senses. Kant thought that was ridiculous and said to remove “exclusively” from the picture. Knowledge may begin with sensory experience, but there are also aspects of reality, like time, which we cannot physically sense but are nonetheless essential in helping us make sense of the things we do…sense. Philosophy really isn’t so daunting when Pirsig—or his narrator, I suppose—is explaining it. He’s the grey bearded, wire rimmed, jovial Robin Williams professor type. It is everything that Phaedrus read and thought and saw, through a more palatable, less dangerous mouthpiece.

I continue to love the portions of the book that take place in the present. I wouldn’t exactly call them plot, but I suppose technically they are. In particular, I love the description of mountain air at the beginning of Chapter 11. “The branches and leaves move with each light breeze as if it were expected, were what had been waited for all this time.” When the travelers meet for breakfast, they are “in love with everything this morning…” Good air will do that to you.

Also, Phaedrus is going to resolve the conflict between classical and romantic thinking, which is a huge relief to me.

After Chapters 13 and 14:

There was a real life Chautauqua! It was beautiful. All of the Chautauquas so far have been inside our narrator’s head, just for us. But here, Pirsig gives us a gathering, and he gives us an out-loud Chautauqua. I love the Montana setting, and I love meeting characters who knew Phaedras. I know it’s a cop out, but I won’t be able to summarize the Chautauqua without using 500 words. It’s all about aligning science, or mechanics, or any other classical pursuit with art, and beauty, and romance. Or rather, it’s about, how when approached correctly, the two are already aligned. It’s cold outside, and there’s a fire, and I want to be in the room where they talk about these things after dinner.

At the end of Part II, just one chapter later:

On the rhetorical rules of writing, I love this bit: “He became convinced that all the writers the students were supposed to mimic wrote without rules, putting down whatever sounded right, then going back to see if it still sounded right and changing it if it didn’t.”

After Part III, but specifically Chapters 24 and 26 (and 25 too, I guess):

I find myself doing a lot of underlining. It’s all been good, but it’s really getting good now. Our narrator is zeroing in.

I love the claim that, “Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors.”

And this: “The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they’re simple only when you know already what they are.”

And, OF COURSE, this: “The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man’s consciousness, are a part of nature’s orders too. The central part.” It comforts me to know that our narrator believes this—highly emotional person that I am.

In Chapter 26, we get into gumption, which made me laugh out loud. I won an award in eight grade called the Agatha Crouter Award that was specifically awarded to a student with gumption, and to this day my mom is always telling me me that I have gumption. It is essentially enthusiasm and drive. Forward momentum powered by a curious and self-assured inner fire. No laughing matter, really. I’m not sure that I have it all the time, but I think that in my best moments I do. It’s something all of us can have, but there are many threats to our stores of gumption!

Our narrator lays it out—an extensive list of those threats, or “gumption traps.” He does so in the context of…yes, motorcycle maintenance, but when he talks about not being able to get started because it feels like everything will go wrong (hello, me), or getting frustrated and impatient when you simply didn’t give yourself enough time in the first place, it’s so easy to relate. To recognize gumption traps in the things I actually know something about, like writing.

He says, “The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be ‘out there’ and the person that appears to be ‘in here’ are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.” Just substitute out “cycle” for whatever it is that you do or make.

At the end, but before the afterword:

What a twist. The ending is beautiful. I loved this book. I love that it speaks such irrefutable truths while also saying very clearly that there is no such thing as an irrefutable truth. It’s a real guide on how to live better, with advice that we can take, but in these last few pages, it also becomes clear just how unreliable our narrator is. It makes me feel slightly unsure about which parts of the book I should take, and think about, and nurture in my own life, and which parts should be left behind.

But then I remember that the desire to decipher is just my classical brain, and any attempt at picking apart this book in an exclusively methodical or classical way will fall sorely short. An attempt of that nature denies Quality—the indefinable quality—which is the stuff of life. I know which parts to hold onto because those parts are Quality. And besides, all the parts, together add up to a Quality book, and there’s no way to prove it and no point in arguing it. You can simply tell when you hold it in your hand and when you read it.

After reading the afterword and also going back to read the introduction:

I didn’t know how much of this story was based on the real facts of Pirsig’s life. It explains why at times I couldn’t figure out whether to write about Pirsig’s ideas or the narrator’s ideas. I know they’re not completely interchangeable—there is a line of separation there. But it’s blurry. I’m blown away that some of these things really happened to him.

In the end, after reading these notes and only editing them a tiny little bit:

It’s really entertaining—for me at least—to see my early impressions knowing what I know now. I really was largely on the right track the whole time! I attribute this entirely to Pirsig’s deft handling of his story and his ideas, and not to any special cleverness or true prescience on my part. The book is a masterpiece—so much so that you don’t realize you’re understanding it when you’re in the act of understanding it.

As I was reading, a thought that repeatedly came into my head was how I would recommend Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I knew I would recommend it, but would I say everyone should read it, or only people interested in philosophy, or only people ready to turn their brains on, or some other qualifier? In the end, I still don’t have an answer. I know it’s not going to be a book that everyone enjoys as much as I did, but I also believe it has the potential.  I want to believe that all of my fellow people, and particularly you, dear readers, have the potential to enjoy it.

I hope that with my light edits, I’ve made these notes coherent enough that they’re interesting to you as a reader who has not read this book. If not, I’m sorry, but I guess you’re just going to have to read it! Then you’ll understand.

1. If you want to nitpick, there are parts of these notes that I didn’t leave “as is,” because I wanted them to make sense and be interesting for you to read. Like adding this footnote. My original notes didn’t have footnotes, since that would be a crazy way to take notes. I added all two of them while I was editing. But! I tried to keep things as original as possible.

2. I know you’re not actually reading so as always, I will endeavor to avoid any spoilers. This is not a book with real spoilers, it’s a Chautauqua after all, not a novel, but I think the point still stands. I personally always prefer to go into a book with only a vague sense of what awaits. I try to make sure my reviews, this one included, give you the same opportunity to read that way if you want to. By the way, this was in my original notes, and I decided to turn it into a footnote. I was wrong as hell. Just because this isn’t a novel doesn’t mean there’s nothing to spoil.