engineer wrote on 04/26/17 at 12:46:13:I bought his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mechanics or was it Maintenance, in the seventies thinking it was actually a how to book about motorcycle mechanics. If you have read this book you'll know I was terribly disappointed, but I read it through to the end anyway. I found the book to be depressing and now I learn in the short bio that the guy was schizophrenic. That explains a lot. In all fairness others liked this book and it was very popular.
Anyway it is sad that he has passed and I hope he found happiness.
Definitely not a "how to" book. Although it does contain a lot of useful insights about the proper state of mind necessary to successfully tackle mechanical work when you don't know the solution to a problem, or even exactly what the problem is when you begin. The ZEN of wrenching, so to speak.
There is a lot of other stuff in there too, Technology vs, romanticism and how to reconcile the two, Pirsig's relationship with his son, and with his mental illness, and the story of the trip itself. A cross country ride two up, with camping gear, on a 305cc Honda is no small undertaking.
Like a lot of fine books ZAMM can be read on many different levels. It's one of my favorite motorcycle books because it's uses motorcycles - riding them and working on them - as a way to talk about a lot of other things.
From the book:
That’s all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There’s no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone’s mind. …
I’ve noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this—that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes—pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts—all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees “steel” as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not. …
These shapes are all out of someone’s mind. That’s important to see. The steel? Hell, even the steel is out of someone’s mind. There’s no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is a potential for steel. There’s nothing else there. But what’s “potential”? That’s also in someone’s mind!Surprisingly, I first read of Pirsig's death on the Harley XL forum. There are are a couple of pages of comments on the the book there. Who knew that a lot of Harley riders, stereotyped as overweight,hairy tattooed neandertals, are actually philosophers.
Pages: 1
