Book corner · Fiction · Memoir & biography · Philosophy · Intermediate
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert M. Pirsig · 1974 · Long (over 350 pages)
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What it is
A novel-like blend of autobiography and philosophy, subtitled An Inquiry into Values. The narrator rides a motorcycle from Minnesota towards California with his young son Chris, joined for the first part by friends John and Sylvia Sutherland. Along the way he delivers a series of reflections he calls Chautauquas. He begins with two attitudes to technology: the romantic, which values surface and feeling and dislikes machines, and the classical, which sees underlying form and enjoys working on them. Caring for a motorcycle becomes a model for attentive, unalienated work and for healing the split between the two outlooks. Gradually the narrator tells the story of Phaedrus, his former self, a teacher of rhetoric whose search for the meaning of Quality, which he came to see as prior to both subject and object, ended in breakdown and electroconvulsive therapy. Phaedrus's quarrel with Plato and Aristotle, and his sympathy for the Sophists, unfold as the trip goes on.
Why read it
It asks what quality, care and good work really are, and it makes questions about reason, technology and values feel personal and urgent.
Where to start
Read the first part slowly for the classical and romantic distinction, and keep going through the middle; the Phaedrus story pays off in the later chapters.