I picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the fall of 2017, immediately bought a motorcycle, and then after much heartache, crying, and gnashing of teeth got rid of it. Pirsig makes the motorcycle seem like a holy object.
Yet, finishing it in 2021 makes me feel a bit unaffected. I’ve seen this all before.
If you’ve ever watched Blade Runner, you’ll feel like it’s a boring movie. Not only is it slow, but the scenes and questions and technologies seem trite. The flying car is overplayed. The replicant drama is well-trodden territory. A city always in the dark full of depressing buildings isn’t new.
When Blade Runner came out, these ideas were new. It’s just that almost forty years later, we’ve seen it all bigger, better, bolder with more CGI. The Star Wars prequels stole flying cars and giant haunted cities. Firefly carried forward the synthetic hybridization of Eastern and Western culture. Hell, I was chastised by a high school creative writing teacher for having penned an existential robot story.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had the same problem: it was so vastly influential, so capturing of the zeitgeist of the counterculture revolution, that its themes have leaked into everyday reading. The themes that crop up- how to deal with the seeming conflict between nature and technology, how to truly care and why to care, how the university system is kind of a scam- these are all well-known to anybody that has used their eyeballs.
I did something a lot like the road trip Pirsig describes in 2015. My brother and I set out (by car, unfortunately) a bit south of his route, but the plains and mountains we passed had the same bones as those where the chautauqua take place. I think if I had read it then, it would have gripped me. Instead, I read All is Quiet on the Western Front.
Venkatehs Rao tweeted while I finished that ZAMM is a “sophomore portal”, or a type of book that has a profound effect on people in their late high school or early college years. I think that is accurate. If you haven’t read a lot, I can see ZAMM being a mental bootloader, installing an (old) operating system that you can use to see the world around you correctly.
For that reason, I can’t recommend it to my peers (if they think they have well-functioning worldviews), but I think I can recommend it to people in their younger years. It installs things that young adults need- a glorification of conscientiousness, a passing vibe (a taste really) of Zen, and is a good test of one’s ability to read complicated shit. The first is something one needs to cultivate to do good in the world, and the second is what all adults need to have any sense of spirituality that isn’t nihilistic or wrong.
The last one improves ones Quality.
