Words&Dirt

I recently had the pleasure of visiting a small bookstore with a new friend, and we decided to buy books for each other. His choice for me was Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’ve been curious about this book for years but never developed sufficient interest to take it on until now. On the surface, it’s the story of a father and son who ride a motorcycle across the American West together, traveling from Minnesota to San Francisco. But the deeper journey takes place inside the father’s mind as he struggles with memories and ideas from his past, which he attributes to an alter ego called Phaedrus. Phaedrus, a hyperintellectual who obsesses about various aspects of metaphysics and ethics, took over the narrator’s life for many years before retreating after a nervous breakdown and electroshock therapy. As they travel westward, the narrator confronts a series of Phaedrus’s flashbacks that force him to reconsider how he is living and relating to his son.

Pirsig’s writing is engaging, especially the travel sections. He has a good eye for detail and his descriptions of landscapes and the experience of passing through them on the motorcycle are beautiful. The careful and loving way the narrator attends to his motorcycle is also inspiring. I wasn’t nearly as impressed by the frequent philosophical sections, which occasionally sparked my interest but mostly bored me. Where the physical journey feels vivid and human, the intellectual one often gets lost in abstraction.

Sometimes books find you at the right moment, and sometimes they don’t. For me, I suspect this book would have been more appealing to my mid-twenties self than it was to my late-thirties self. My own “Phaedrus period”––far less dramatic than the narrator’s––is long over and I couldn’t be happier about that. Being captivated by esoteric philosophical ideas was a special and necessary stage in my personal development, but I ultimately had to leave it behind because it produced too much of a desire to uncover the “Truth” of things, which set me up for social failure when it came to coexisting with other people who didn’t see things my way. This is a major problem for Phaedrus, who comes off as arrogant and self-centered, even if he is brilliant. He becomes enthralled with the idea of “Quality” being a sort of metaphysical substrate for everything else in the universe––an idea that struck me as both useless and obviously incorrect (or maybe I’m just unable to grok it). Pirsig subjects the reader to long stretches of dense speculation about the nature of Quality and its special role in determining the natural order. I was able to salvage the occasional gem from these sections but for the most part my eyes would begin to glaze over and I’d become desperate for the next road section.

The other thing that really bothered me was the narrator’s relationship with his son, Chris. Chris is clearly in distress for large parts of the journey, and his suffering is met with various displays of callousness and indifference from his father. The narrator is too busy either tinkering with his motorcycle or polishing his concept of “Quality” to devote much time or attention to the flesh-and-blood humans around him. He is aware of their disconnection and even haunted by it in his dreams, but doesn’t seem to be able to shift his way of relating to Chris into anything that resembles compassionate or loving parenting. As the book closes, Pirsig treats the reemergence of Phaedrus as a kind of solution, since Phaedrus supposedly had a better relationship with Chris before the breakdown. This “solution” to the relational dysfunction struck me as both inadequate and foreboding, given how things went when Phaedrus was in charge last time around. The book attempts to leave the reader with a sense of optimism about the father-son dynamic, but the only thing that registered for me was sadness. This reaction stems from the stage of life I’m in, where it’s hard to take seriously stories that privilege intellect over the messy, emotional work of real relationship.

All of that said, there are some great insights about technology, science, nature, and ethics contained in this book. I’d find myself exasperated and wanting to quit, only to then stumble upon a paragraph that restored my will to continue. This one was my favorite:

I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature, which are inevitably dualistic, full of subjects and objects and their relationship to one another; or with programs full of things for other people to do. I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning. Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. (310-1)

This passage cut through the intellectual noise and hit me right in the center of my being, especially the notion that “one’s own heart and head and hands” are the primary drivers of improvement. I couldn’t agree more, and I wish that these kinds of sentiments had played a more prominent role in the book, which could have been much shorter and sharper with the help of a good editor.

I’ve been hard on Pirsig in this review, so I’ll end on a humble note. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has captivated a great many readers over the last fifty years, and I imagine its overall impact has been very positive. Pirsig’s a smart man and I think his heart’s in the right place; it’s quite possible that my failure to connect with this book on a deeper level is entirely my own. And even if this book’s not for me––at least not right now––that doesn’t mean it won’t find you at exactly the right moment.

Rating: 4/10