Robert Pirsigã¢ââ¢s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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Reading Robert Pirsig's description of a road trip today, ane feels bereft. In his 1974 autobiographical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he describes an unhurried pace over two-lane roads and through thunderstorms that accept the narrator and his companions by surprise every bit they ride through the Due north Dakota plains. They register the miles in subtly varying marsh odors and in blackbirds spotted, rather than in coordinates ticked off. Nigh shocking, there is a child on the dorsum of one of the motorcycles. When was the last time you saw that? The travelers' exposure—to bodily adventure, to all the unknowns of the road—is arresting to present-day readers, specially if they don't ride motorcycles. And this exposure is somehow existential in its significance: Pirsig conveys the experience of being fully in the earth, without the mediation of devices that filter reality, smoothing its rough edges for our psychic condolement.
If such experiences feel less available to us now, Pirsig would not be surprised. Already, in 1974, he offered this story every bit a meditation on a particular way of moving through the world, 1 that felt marked for extinction. The volume, which uses the narrator'southward road trip with his son and two friends as a journeying of research into values, became a massive best seller, and in the decades since its publication has inspired millions to seek their ain accommodation with modernistic life, governed by neither a reflexive aversion to engineering science, nor a naive organized religion in information technology. At the middle of the story is the motorcycle itself, a 1966 Honda Super Hawk. Hondas began to sell widely in America in the 1960s, inaugurating an abiding fascination with Japanese blueprint amongst American motorists, and the visitor's founder, Soichiro Honda, raised the idea of "quality" to a quasi-mystical condition, coinciding with Pirsig's own efforts in Zen to clear a "metaphysics of quality." Pirsig's writing conveys his loyalty to this machine, a human relationship of care extending over many years. I got to piece of work on several Hondas of this vintage when I ran a motorbike repair shop in Richmond, Virginia. Compared to British bikes of the same era, the Hondas seemed more refined. (My writing career grew out of these experiences—an try to articulate the human element in mechanical work.)
In the first chapter, a disagreement develops between the narrator and his riding companions, John and Sylvia, over the question of motorbike maintenance. Robert performs his own maintenance, while John and Sylvia insist on having a professional practice it. This posture of non-involvement, we soon learn, is a crucial element of their countercultural sensibility. They seek escape from "the whole organized flake" or "the organisation," as the couple puts information technology; technology is a death force, and the signal of hitting the route is to exit it backside. The solution, or rather evasion, that John and Sylvia hit on for managing their revulsion at applied science is to "Have it somewhere else. Don't have it here." The irony is they notwithstanding find themselves entangled with The Car—the 1 they sit on.
Zen and the Art of Motorbike Maintenance
A narration of a summertime motorbike trip undertaken by a begetter and his son, the book becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into primal questions of how to live. The narrator's relationship with his son leads to a powerful self-reckoning; the arts and crafts of motorcycle maintenance leads to an austerely beautiful process for reconciling science, religion, and humanism
Today, we oft use "technology" to refer to systems whose inner workings are assiduously kept out of view, magical devices that offer no apparent friction between the cocky and the world, no need to principal the grubby details of their operation. The manufacture of our smartphones, the algorithms that guide our digital experiences from the deject—information technology all takes place "somewhere else," just every bit John and Sylvia wished.
Even so lately we have begun to realize that this very opacity has opened new avenues of surveillance and manipulation. Big Tech at present orders everyday life more than deeply than John and Sylvia imagined in their techno-dystopian nightmare. Today, a road trip to "go away from information technology all" would depend on GPS, and would prompt digital ads tailored to our destination. The whole excursion would exist mined for behavioral data and used to nudge usa into profitable channels, likely without our even knowing it.
We don't know what Pirsig, who died in 2017, thought of these developments, every bit he refrained from well-nigh interviews afterward publishing a second novel, Lila, in 1991. Simply his narrator has left us a way out that can be reclaimed by anyone venturesome enough to try it: He patiently attends to his ain motorcycle, submits to its quirky mechanical needs and learns to sympathize it. His way of living with machines doesn't rely on the seductions of effortless convenience; it requires us to get our easily muddied, to exist self-reliant. In Zen, we see a man maintaining direct appointment with the world of textile objects, and with it some measure of independence—both from the purveyors of magic and from cultural despair.
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/robert-pirsig-zen-art-motorcycle-maintenance-resonates-today-180975768/
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