So off and on you go
The seconds tick the time out
There’s so much left to know
And I’m on the road to find out
… the answer lies within
So why not take a look now
Kick out the devil’s sin
Pick up, pick up a good book now
Cat Stevens

Who among us hasn’t revisited a favourite book years after reading it, only to wonder why you read it and what you thought about in the first place.

I first read Robert M Pirsig’s iconic road novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance  back in the 1976 – a barely fictional meditation on fatherhood,  Zen, tools, and the idea that quality – the main conceptual preoccupation of Pirsig’s life – lay in the repetition of right actions.

I can’t remember why I bought it, and indeed, read it all – other than perhaps because reviewers were raving about it. I had no interest nor aptitude in matters mechanical – I couldn’t even drive in those days. I recall that I found it quite mesmerising in its meticulous “naming of parts”, to quote the WWII poem by Henry Reed juxtaposing the mechanical and natural worlds that encapsulated the urge we have to see significance in the ordinary, the routine, “the drill”. 

The blurb on the front cover declared: “this book will change the way you think and feel about your life”. But it didn’t – not a jot. I didn’t say to myself “I want to read a book that will change my life”. At the time, I didn’t reckon I was particularly searching for meaning or enlightenment or anything like that. Life in London was relaxed, comfortable, and interesting. Considering that it was the political and economically unstable mid-seventies, things were moving along quite smoothly. The inevitable speed hump and reset with their disruptions and discontents and an abrupt and unexpected change of location and lifestyle, career and country were a couple of years down the track.

Today, I recall that reading it was a bit of a chore and that the narrative was like watching paint dry, a kind of biker’s Proust. I don’t remember very much of at all – although there’s one thing I relate to this this day – the narrator’s observation that the writing of technical instruction manuals was always delegated to the least productive and capable member of the the production line – which explains why so many are so difficult to follow. Most folk can certainly agree with that.

The book remained on my bookshelf through many moves, including to the other side of the world, and in the last relocation eight years ago, from an inner city terrace to a forest in northern New South Wales, for which I’d culled some two thirds of a library accumulated over half a century. This thumbed, battered and faded paperback hung in there in its creased and purple glory with the image of a wrench morphing into what looks to me like a lotus flower.

Perhaps it survived because I’d always unconsciously resolved to return to it one fine day when I’d reread it and discover a meaning of the universe. I’m nowhere near ready for that reunion. But the retrospective republished below prompted me to pick up the old book – if only because thought I might’ve written some comments on the insides of the cover as was my habit back in the day, and obtain an inkling of what was going on in my younger head I might back in the day. But there was nothing, nada, nix! I was quite disappointed. 

My eyes were drawn, however, to the raves on the back cover: “The most exciting book I have read in years” declared a reviewer in Vogue. Newsweek called it “the most explosive detective story of high ideas in recent years”. And inside, before we get to the story, there are three pages of accolades, many in upper case – were this online today, we’d call that shouting! “A miracle that sparkles like an electric dream”. “Exhilarating, dramatic, classic”. “Brilliant and original”. “Profoundly important”. “It lodges in the mind as few recent novels have”. “An unforgettable trip”. The long gone Sydney Sun Herald called it a work of art.

The author of the Pirsig retrospective republished below appears to hold the same opinion. “I am not particularly self-aware” he writes, “nor do I have much memory for the person I was at the time. So I can’t really explain to you why “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” had such a hold on me”.  What follows is a philosophical riff on Robert Lewis Stevenson’s well-worn adage that it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive – even when getting there, like Bono, you still haven’t found what you’re looking for. I do like his last sentence: “If there’s one thing I would say to Pirsig, or even that younger self driving across Montana whose head was filled with a vain, almost-inhuman spirituality, is that everyone, in their way, is trying to find the thing you’re trying to find”. I guess in our own way, we are all seekers.

Earlier this year, I jettisoned half of what remained of what remained of my book collection –  books that had followed me as moved from Birmingham to Reading to London, migrated to Australia, and moved from house to house in Sydney and finally settled in the midst of the forest. Out went books of all formats and genres. Mementos of former passions and fashions. Relics of past courses and careers. Old school textbooks, university texts, fiction, nonfiction, dictionaries, coffee table books. I’d worked for years in publishing so the complimentary copies alone were colossal. 

My primary criteria was that if I hadn’t looked inside the covers of a book for twenty, thirty, fifty years, then I wasn’t likely to do so in the next five, ten, twenty years I have left on this planet.

And out went Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

© Paul Hemphill 2024.  All rights reserved

See also in In That Howling Infinite, Better Read Than Dead – books, poems and reading

 

Returning, Again, to Robert M. Pirsig

All roads lead to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Jay Caspian Kang, New Yorker, October 25, 2022

Every writer I know has memories they return to in their work over and over again. There is rarely much logic to the choices, nor do such memories tend to align with the sorts of significant events that traditionally make up the timeline of one’s life. My point of fixation, one that’s appeared a few times in my writing, occurred during a solo cross-country road trip I took at the age of nineteen. I was driving to Seattle, where I knew nobody, and was planning to stop for the night in Billings, Montana. It was already late, and I had been keeping myself awake with a non-stop chain of cigarettes and vending-machine coffee I’d dutifully bought at every rest stop along the way. I had a pile of books on tape on the passenger’s seat. About an hour outside of Billings, I put in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which, coincidentally, starts out on a road trip to Montana. The first line—“I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning”—had a hypnotic effect on me. I blew through Billings that night, and for the next six hours I listened to Robert M. Pirsig’s barely fictional meditation on fatherhood, Chautauquas, Zen, tools, and the idea that quality—the main conceptual preoccupation of Pirsig’s life—lay in the repetition of right actions.

I am not particularly self-aware, nor do I have much memory for the person I was at the time. So I can’t really explain to you why “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” had such a hold on me. Even back then, I knew that the book was considered a bit gauche—a manual for the type of seekers who plumb out all the parts of Eastern religions that justify their own selfish behavior, who spend their days walking the earth in a fog of patchouli oil and immense self-regard. But I was also captivated by the idea that dharma demanded a sense of conscientious and careful action, whether maintaining a 1966 Honda Super Hawk, shooting free throws, or writing. I was, and I suppose still am, deeply suspicious of the life of the mind, and wanted to believe that enlightenment existed elsewhere.

Over time, I distilled my particular reading of Pirsig down to a line from “I am I be,” a song by De La Soul in which Posdnuos raps, “If I was a rug cleaner / Bet you Pos’d have the cleanest rugs.” The point, as far as I could tell at that young age, wasn’t the competition for the cleanest rugs but, rather, that the dedication to expertly cleaning a rug would yield moments in which the body would fall away from the mind, and you could touch the outer edges of enlightenment.

“On Quality,” a collection of Pirsig’s speeches, fiction, letters, and musings that was posthumously published last month, might not satisfy the reader seeking a nostalgic return to the road or the mechanic’s shop. The text, instead, reads like a notebook from a life spent pondering: What does “quality” mean? Why are some things better than others? What is it about humans that causes us to recognize the difference? His answer is that quality “is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a non-thinking or intuitive process.” He continues, “Because definitions are a product of rigid reasoning, quality can never be rigidly defined. But everyone knows what it is.”

As in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Pirsig mostly defines “quality” by what it is not. That book starts with a dichotomy: on one side is the narrator, who maintains his own motorcycle and understands its every function; on the other is his riding partner John, who owns a high-priced BMW and can’t even be bothered to learn how to fix it. The narrator doesn’t understand John’s relationship to his machine and realizes that, whereas the narrator can see the Buddha in the gears of an engine, John believes that technology or man-made things are anathema to the spiritual reasons why he rides his bike. Who, then, is correct—the logician or the romantic? Who is closer to quality? The answer, according to Pirsig, is neither, but also everything:

Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the goal of Art. It remains to work these concepts into a practical, down-to-earth context, and for this there is nothing more practical or down-to-earth than what I have been talking about all along—the repair of an old motorcycle.

There’s a very good chance that unless you spent a decent portion of your life thinking about dharma, reading the Upanishads, or discussing the works of Shunryu Suzuki, there will be very little in “On Quality” that will be of interest to you. The collection almost reads like a scientific proof that tries to identify the exact location of quality while also arguing, somewhat more convincingly, that such a task is impossible. What the reader is left with, then, are a series of word puzzles and contradictions that can be frustrating, but which reveal a lifelong search for what moves Pirsig in a way he cannot explain. In the book’s preface, Wendy Pirsig tells the story of what happened when her late husband joined the army and was stationed in Korea:

Stepping off the train in South Korea when the troops first arrived, he saw a dusting of snow over the nearby mountains that was so beautiful and strange and reflected such a different culture that he became almost ecstatic. “I walked around. It was like Shangri La,” he recalled years later. “I think I was crying. I just stared at the roofs wondering what kind of culture could have built roofs like that,” he said.

In the lineage of Eastern philosophy in American letters—see the works of Pirsig, J. D. Salinger, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, or Jack Kerouac—you’ll often find a desire to negate the innate hunger of life. The authors try to find something better in the image of, say, a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water next to white chickens. This country, they say, is dull and greedy and always misses the point. The possibility of a new type of ecstatic vision and a life filled with meaningful tasks, I imagine, is what drew me and so many other readers to “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” We believed Pirsig could see the Buddha in a well-maintained carburetor. We wanted to see it, too, and we wanted to work as he did, perhaps in large part because we saw very little future for ourselves in the striving world.

But, as I read all this back today, I was mostly struck by a central contradiction that appears not only in Pirsig’s writing but also in the work of so many of his fellow literary Zen seekers. On the one hand, Pirsig believes that the universality of quality means that everyone can access it. But he also seems to have very little faith that the people around him—whether John, his motorcycling buddy, or even his readers—can actually see quality in the wild. At times Pirsig treats the task of explaining it like his burden to bear. Yet the idea that something is just good and true for ineffable reasons that defy both logical explanation and romantic self-projection should be familiar to anyone who has listened to Nina Simone sing “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” As Pirsig himself acknowledges: we all know.

Sometimes, while scrolling through TikTok late at night, I’ll come across a genre of video in which vocal coaches analyze viral clips of performances by young, effusive singing machines who have been through years of training. Nothing could be more annoying or besides the point than the coaches’ gushings over the control of the upper registers, or the clean transitions in the runs. Pirsig would probably say that these sorts of categorizations are purely an intellectual, and ultimately futile, exercise: he argues—correctly—that only pedants feel the need to contextualize every quality moment into a narrative that tries to discern its truth. But it’s perhaps even more pedantic to process so much of this idea through lengthy, philosophical treatises that try to obscure and make unknowable something we feel nearly every day.

Quality, Pirsig says, surrounds us. It is in a rug cleaned with care, a well-maintained garden, and the order of words in a sentence. I do not know if there is a way to trick oneself into noticing more of these instances of quality, nor do I know if enlightenment rests on the accumulation of little ecstasies, nor do I believe—at least anymore—that those of us who have sought the path through books, meditation, or study have any more access to “quality” than those who have not. If there’s one thing I would say to Pirsig, or even that younger self driving across Montana whose head was filled with a vain, almost-inhuman spirituality, is that everyone, in their way, is trying to find the thing you’re trying to find.