Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1000 Books to Read)

Books like this always make my head hurt! It is philosophy. I was most interested in their motorcycle route (They go to places I have been - so that was fun. Toward the end, they travel to Crater Lake in Oregon!) and the relationship between father and son (who was stabbed to death after the book was written). 

It was challenging to follow, but I began to understand it toward the end. I am no philosopher, and the concrete, real world and complicated relationships are more where my head (and heart) reside. Regardless, I am so glad I read this.

From the author's reflection in the "Afterward":

Culture-bearing books challenge cultural value assumptions and often do so at a time when the culture is changing in favor of their challenge. The books are not necessarily of high quality. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was no literary masterpiece but it was a culture-bearing book. It came at a time when the entire culture was about to reject slavery. People seized upon it as a portrayal of their own new values and it became an overwhelming success. 

The success of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance seems the result of this culture-bearing phenomenon. The involuntary shock treatment described here is against the law today. It is a violation of human liberty. The culture has changed.

The book also appeared at a time of cultural upheaval on the matter of material success. Hippies were having none of it. Conservatives were baffled. Material success was the American dream. Millions of European peasants had longed for it all their lives and come to America to find it—a world in which they and their descendants would at last have enough. Now their spoiled descendants were throwing that whole dream in their faces, saying it wasn’t any good. What did they want? 

The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it “freedom,” but in the final analysis “freedom” is a purely negative goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren’t really offering any alternatives other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more and more like pure degeneracy.

Degeneracy can be fun but it’s hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation. 

This book offers another, more serious alternative to material success. It’s not so much an alternative as an expansion of the meaning of “success” to something larger than just getting a good job and staying out of trouble. And also something larger than mere freedom. It gives a positive goal to work toward that does not confine. That is the main reason for the book’s success, I think. The whole culture happened to be looking for exactly what this book has to offer. That is the sense in which it is a culture-bearer.

Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (pp. 436-437). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

I thought this was profound, and he wrote this at a time when I was coming into adulthood. So, I was a witness to what he is talking about. (But if he had gone a little farther south, he would have seen many of those degenerate hippies coming out of  Degeneracy to True Freedom in the  Jesus Revolution!)

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

Some books resonate deeply with the tenor of their times. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig’s 1974 “inquiry into values,” is a case in point. Rejected, according to the author, by dozens of editors before it finally found a publisher, it became an enduring publishing phenomenon, selling millions of copies. The book has a skeletal plot: A man, his young son, and two friends are on vacation, riding motorcycles in the American West. But in the course of their trip, Pirsig ruminates on fundamental philosophical matters in an effort “to see if in that strange separation of what man is from what man does we may have some clues as to what the hell has gone wrong in this twentieth century.” Conversational in its account of the journey, focused and dense in its consideration of Greek thought, of classicism and Romanticism, of reason and feeling, Zen and the Art makes up in richness what it lacks in rigor. Pirsig’s questing reach exceeds his grasp in the same way our own awkward questions about life’s meaning outpace the capacity of our answers. His book is a renewing and exhilarating ride.