Article 2 - REVIEW OF "ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE" February 2007 edition of First Church of The Streets

    "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsig shouldn't have been a good read, but it was. It wasn't a page-turner; many times the place went fairly slow as I tried to figure out what the author's point was. There's pages and pages of intellectualizations, random ponderings, and rambling sections of prose that for all intents and purposes, detracts from the plot of a narrative nonfiction book. It should have been, because of all of this, a boring, plodding treatise that I would have given up on by page thirty, treating it like the sleep inducing college textbooks I ignored in university. It shouldn't have been a good read, but it was. It should have been boring, but it wasn't.

    Over time, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" has become a modern classic. . I certainly had heard about the book and was somewhat aware of the buzz surrounding it, but didn't really think about reading the book myself until I found out the book entailed a travelogue as well as lessons learned from working on a motorcycle. My hesitation had to do with concern that the book was one big how-to lesson, full of diagrams of some guy sitting in his garage so bored with manuals that he decides sitting zazen may be more interesting than all this machinery. Seeing the book sitting in the travel section of my library inspired me somewhat, and I figured it was time for me to meet this book. Besides that, I'd sort of referred to it in another article, when another book I reviewed, "Travels with My Chicken", alluded to it by making a play on words in another title "Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance". Maybe, I figured, the flow, the Tao, God, chance, or whatever you want to call it, was leading me to read this thing. So with a spirit that was apropos to the work, I did.

    Pirsig's work is multilayered and rich without seeming to trip too much itself, which is why it probably works on so many different levels for so many different people. The times I needed to reread sections were simply areas where I felt that a quick browse would defeat the purpose of the message. It would be like trying to speed read the Tibetan Book of the Dead; Pirsig's book is not intended to be a quick summer read at the beach.

    As he says in his updated introduction, one really can't set out to write a "culture-bearer" book, which is what this book turned out to be. In the late sixties, Pirsig set out on a motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California accompanied by his young son, Chris. Much of the book contains the conventional measures of travelogue, that which contains a beginning, a middle, and an end. Much of the book also contains what he calls a Chautauqua, old-time series talks intended to edify the mind of the hearer, describing the values he has learned through his forty year life.

    But mainly, the trip, as well as the book itself, entails a search for the narrator's lost self whom he refers to as Phaedrus, a self that he knows that was once alive but was sentenced to death and electrocuted in the name of the author's mental health. In losing that part of himself, the author seeks to reconnect with that element of himself who defined himself for so many years. Who was Phaedrus, what were his values, how does that man, affect him now? And was what he thought so wrong anyway? These are some of the issues Pirsig wrestles with on the long stretches of highway away from the society that has tried to redefine him.

    Motorcycle maintenance does come up in this discourse, by the way. It's best, though, if one reads the book to find out how it plays out, not only in Pirsig's book, but in one's own life. In sometimes intellectual dialectic, and in sometimes the most pedantic prose in everyday life, Pirsig's observations and his journey is not one to be rushed through, a behavior he warns about anyway. Like life, it is to be noticed, experienced, seen for the quality is. It is a book to read and perhaps read again, to see how far one has come in meeting him or herself along the path.