Pirsig, R. M. (2008). Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: an inquiry into values. New York, N.Y.: HarperPerennial. ~

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appear because of just that. Tensions disappear along old roads like this. (11)

Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere. (12)

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes. (13)

It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. (13)

We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. (15)

“What’s new?” is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question “What is best?,” a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. (16)

Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for. (16)

And, of course, when you discover something like that it’s like discovering a tooth with a missing filling. You can never leave it alone. You have to probe it, work around it, push on it, think about it, not because it’s enjoyable but because it’s on your mind and it won’t get off your mind. (19)

But there are human forces stronger than logic. (25)

I just think that their flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating. The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. (26)

I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much. (27)

You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time. (33)

I don’t want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. (35)

“My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn’t that superior. IQs aren’t that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thoughts, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons, and quants are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.” (40)

“We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.” (41)

“Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination… Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.” (42)

I try always to pick a book far over his head and read it as a basis for questions and answers, rather than without interruption. I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way. They must be written this way. (47)

I care about these moldy old riding gloves. I smile at them flying through the breeze beside me because they have been there for so many years and are so old and so tired and so rotten there is something kind of humorous about them. They have become filled with oil and swear and dirt and spattered bugs and now when I set them down flat on a table, even when they are not cold, they won’t stay flat. They’ve got a memory of their own. (49)

If they can’t stand physical discomfort and they can’t stand technology, they’ve got a little compromising to do. They depend on the technology and condemn it at the same time. I’m sure they know that and that just contributes to their dislike of the whole situation. They’re not presenting a logical thesis, they’re just reporting how it is. (51)

Blind alley, though. If someone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name. You haven’t solved anything. (52)

“You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it’s just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it’s gone.” (53)

“There’s nothing up ahead that’s any better than it is right here.” (54)

You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations. (59)

I suppose he just thinking about everything the way he thinks about drumming—which is to say he doesn’t really think about it at all. He just does it. Is with it. (59)

Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge. We were both looking at the same thing, seeing the same thing, except he was looking, seeing, talking and thinking from a completely different dimension. (60)

“I’m not sure of much of anything these days. Maybe that’s why I talk so much.” (68)

Barren hills, no one anywhere, not a sound; and there is something about places like this that raises your spirits a little and makes you think that things will probably get better. (71)

A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. (73)

The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. (73)

The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws—which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. In the European cultures it is primarily a masculine mode and the fields of science, law and medicine are unattractive to women largely for this reason. (74)

Although surface ugliness is often found in the classic mode of understanding it is not inherent in it. There is a classic esthetic which romantics often miss because of its subtlety. The classic style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known… Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this control is maintained. (74)

To a romantic this classic mode often appears dull, awkward and ugly, like mechanical maintenance itself. Everything is in terms of pieces and parts and components and relationships. (74)

Within the classic mode, however, the romantic has some appearances of his own. Frivolous, irrational, erratic, untrustworthy, interested primarily in pleasure-seeking. Shallow. Of no substance. Often a parasite who cannot or will not carry his own weight. A real drag on society. (74)

But no one is willing to give up the truth as he sees it, and as far as I know, no one now living has any real reconciliation of these truths or modes. There is no point at which these visions of reality are unified. (75)

Unusual behavior tends to produce estrangement in others which tends to further the unusual behavior and thus the estrangement in self-stoking cycles until some sort of climax is reached. (75)

His way of looking at things produces a kind of description that can be called an “analytic” description. That is another name of the classic platform from which one discusses things in terms of their underlying form. (76)

That is the romantic face of the classic mode. Dull, awkward and ugly. Few romantics get beyond that point. (78)

…there is a knife moving here. A very deadly one; an intellectual scalpel so swift and sharp you sometimes don’t see it moving. You get the illusion that all those parts ae just there and are being named as they exist. But they can be named quite differently and organized quite differently depending on how the knife moves. (79)

It is important to see this knife for what it is and not to be fooled into thinking that motorcycles or anything else are the way they are just because the knife happened to cut it up that way. It is important to concentrate on the knife itself. (79)

He was after something. That is important. He was after something and he used the knife because that was the only tool he had. But he took on so much and went so far in the end his real victim was himself. (80)

From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world. (82)

You’d think the process of subdivision and classification would come to an end somewhere, but it doesn’t. It just goes on and on. (82)

Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other. (83)

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. (83)

He was insane. And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he’s insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at it. Otherwise your own opinions block the way. (84)

This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says. (85)

I’m no more comfortable than they are in this heat but there’s no point in dwelling on it. All day while I’ve been thinking and talking about Phaedrus they must have been thinking about how bad all this is. That’s what’s really wearing them down. The thought. (87)

In proportion to his intelligence he was extremely isolated. There’s no record of his having had close friends. He traveled alone. Always. Even in the presence of others he was completely alone. People sometimes felt this and felt rejected by it, and so did not like him, but their dislike was not important to him. (87)

Like that timber wolf on the mountain he had a kind of animal courage. He went his own way with unconcern for consequences that sometimes stunned people, and stuns me now to hear about it. He did not often swerve to right or left. I’ve discovered that. But this courage didn’t arise from any idealistic idea of self-sacrifice, only from the intensity of his pursuit, and there was nothing noble about it.

I think his pursuit of the ghost of rationality occurred because he wanted to wreak revenge on it, because he felt he himself was so shaped by it. He wanted to free himself from his own image. He wanted to destroy it because the ghost was what he was and he wanted to be free from the bondage of his own identity. (89)