Why Robert Pirsig’s 1974 Book Still Resonates Today. The author’s meditation on technology treads a whole new path in the modern, digital world. A modern discussion on the book's reverence today.
By :Matthew B. Crawford October 2020
My Note: I have enjoyed motorized 2 wheel riding since I was 14. My neighbor in VA. at the height of "You Meet The Nicest People On A Honda" wave, bought a Honda 90. It would do 50mph going downhill with a tail wind. He needed a place to store it and he worked a second shift job. I traded my grandfather's, now unused chicken house plus gas, and maintenance for riding it while he was at work. I was hooked. A Honda 350, 500 and 750 followed along with other manufacturers two wheel beauties. All of which demanded customization and maintenance.
Riding has been an dangerous trill every since. More later on my latest iteration and the upgrades I have install myself. Yes the "“metaphysics of quality”. Working on the bike, then joying your efforts on the open road. Truly "open".
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Reading Robert Pirsig's description of a road trip today, one 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 take the narrator and his companions by surprise as they ride through the North Dakota plains. They register the miles in subtly varying marsh odors and in blackbirds spotted, rather than in coordinates ticked off. Most shocking, there is a child on the back of one of the motorcycles. When was the last time you saw that? The travelers’ exposure—to bodily hazard, to all the unknowns of the road—is arresting to present-day readers, especially if they don’t ride motorcycles. And this exposure is somehow existential in its significance: Pirsig conveys the experience of being fully in the world, without the mediation of devices that filter reality, smoothing its rough edges for our psychic comfort.
1974
Still Available on Amazon
If such experiences feel less available to us now, Pirsig would not be surprised. Already, in 1974, he offered this story as a meditation on a particular way of moving through the world, one that felt marked for extinction. The book, which uses the narrator’s road trip with his son and two friends as a journey of inquiry into values, became a massive best seller, and in the decades since its publication has inspired millions to seek their own accommodation with modern life, governed by neither a reflexive aversion to technology, nor a naive faith in it. At the heart 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 design among American motorists, and the company’s founder, Soichiro Honda, raised the idea of “quality” to a quasi-mystical status, coinciding with Pirsig’s own efforts in Zen to articulate a “metaphysics of quality.” Pirsig’s writing conveys his loyalty to this machine, a relationship of care extending over many years. I got to work on several Hondas of this vintage when I ran a motorcycle 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 effort 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 motorcycle maintenance. Robert performs his own maintenance, while John and Sylvia insist on having a professional do it. This posture of non-involvement, we soon learn, is a crucial element of their countercultural sensibility. They seek escape from “the whole organized bit” or “the system,” as the couple puts it; technology is a death force, and the point of hitting the road is to leave it behind. The solution, or rather evasion, that John and Sylvia hit on for managing their revulsion at technology is to “Have it somewhere else. Don’t have it here.” The irony is they still find themselves entangled with The Machine—the one they sit on.
Anyone else remember the book?
This is a book I've always wanted to read and perhaps it's time to move it near the top of the list. Thank you for the summary and inspiration!
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