Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Review and Summary Notes

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Review

My main takeaway from this book is “quality exists”. Although we may disagree on how to measure quality, it does exist. I also like the commentary on original thinking.

See also: Is there such a thing as good taste?

Notes

Riding a motorcycle gets you closer to reality:

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. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.

The author notes how so many car travelers on the road look sad as they’re speeding to their vacation destination instead of enjoying the highway.

The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away.

As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can!

For a while I thought what I should have done was sneak over to the workbench, cut a shim from the beer can, remove the printing and then come back and tell him we were in luck, it was the last one I had, specially imported from Germany. That would have done it. A special shim from the private stock of Baron Alfred Krupp, who had to sell it at a great sacrifice. Then he would have gone gaga over it.

Technology vs. anti-technology attitudes

They talk once in a while in as few pained words as possible about “it” or “it all” as in the sentence, “There is just no escape from it.” And if I asked, “From what?” the answer might be “The whole thing,” or “The whole organized bit,” or even “The system.” Sylvia once said defensively, “Well, you know how to cope with it,” which puffed me up so much at the time I was embarrassed to ask what “it” was and so remained somewhat puzzled. I thought it was something more mysterious than technology. But now I see that the “it” was mainly, if not entirely, technology. But, that doesn’t sound right either. The “it” is a kind of force that gives rise to technology, something undefined, but inhuman, mechanical, lifeless, a blind monster, a death force. Something hideous they are running from but know they can never escape. I’m putting it way too heavily here but in a less emphatic and less defined way this is what it is. Somewhere there are people who understand it and run it but those are technologists, and they speak an inhuman language when describing what they do. It’s all parts and relationships of unheard-of things that never make any sense no matter how often you hear about them. And their things, their monster keeps eating up land and polluting their air and lakes, and there is no way to strike back at it, and hardly any way to escape it.

Eat bitterness:

A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption.

Getting around writer’s block. How to write originally instead of repeating what others have already written:

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. […] Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.

Seeing from different perspectives

Chris was sad and complaining about how much he hated the road trip the entire time, until they swapped seats:

“It’s so different.”

“What?”

“Everything. I never could see over your shoulders before.”

The sunlight makes strange and beautiful designs through the tree branches on the road. It flits light and dark into my eyes. We swing into a curve and then up into the open sunlight.

That’s true. I never realized it. All this time he’s been staring into my back. “What do you see?” I ask.

“It’s all different.”

See also: Red Light Green Light

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