Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Robert M. Pirsig.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert M. Pirsig
New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc.
1974

Why read it? The author sets out on a motorcycle vacation trip from Minnesota to California with his estranged teed-age son, Chris. It is actually a trip that retraces his career as a college teacher of writing before a mental breakdown. The ghost of "Phaedrus," the person he was before his breakdown, is ever present.

He is attempting to reconstruct what he was before the breakdown. The book is a combination of the details of the trip, maintenance of the hard-working motorcycle on such a long trip and meditations on topics related to his teaching of writing. His recurring dream is of being behind a glass door and trying to open it so that he can re-connect with his wife and their two sons. At first, he assumes the dream means he is dead. His son Chris has had the same dream and the glass door for him was the door that separated his insane father from his family. The keeper, the shrouded, shadowy figure who will not allow him to open the glass door is actually Phaedrus, the man he was before his breakdown.

Zen is a school of Mahayana Buddhism that asserts that enlightenment can be attained through meditation, self-contemplation, and intuition rather than through faith and devotion and that is practiced mainly in china, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Also called Zen Buddhism.

Some sample ideas from the book:

One of Phaedrus's memorable experiences as a teacher occurred when he attempted to eliminate grades in order to stimulate motivation to learn for the sake of learning, to achieve goals as opposed to grades, the stifling of motivation by the grading system. "The next quarter he dropped the whole idea and went back to regular grading discouraged, confused, feeling he was right but somehow it had come out all wrong."

"As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric could begin.... Little children didn't have it [the habit of imitation]. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's." "...a student conditioned to work for a grade rather than for the knowledge the grade was supposed to represent." "The student's biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, 'If you don't whip me, I won't work.' "

"Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not. But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it is really learning. The questions, What's being taught? What's the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes a large and frightening vacuum."

"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." "...we stop and have supper in a modern restaurant in which people also come and go without looking at each other. The service is excellent but impersonal." "Maybe that's why I feel like an archaeologist and have such a tension about it. I have only these fragments of memory and pieces of things people tell me, and I keep wondering as we get closer if some tombs are better left shut."

"What the hell is quality?"

Quote: "Cliches and stereotypes such as 'beatniks' or 'hippie' have been invented for antitechnologists, the antisystem people.... But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term.... It is against being a mass person that they seem to be revolting. And they feel that technology has got a lot to do with the forces that are trying to turn them into mass people and they don't like it."

Quote: "Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices--TV, jets, freeways and so on--but I hope it's been made plain that the real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity."

Quote: "Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive."

Quote: "...to avoid talking in terms of principles of composition, all of which he had deep doubts about. He felt that by exposing classes to his own sentences as he made them, with all the misgivings and hang-ups and erasures, he would give a more honest picture of what writing was like than by spending class time picking nits in completed student work or holding up the completed work of masters for emulation."