Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is Robert Pirsig’s semi autobiographical account of his journey across America on a motorcycle together with his son. Along the way, he expounds on his ideas about motorcycle maintenance, his attempt to bridge the gap between the romantic and the classical approach through the concept of Quality, and his thoughts on sanity.
I doubt I will ever go mad like Robert because of an intractable intellectual conundrum. I am no longer as enamored with purely intellectual quests as I was once was when I used to dream of becoming a scholar. I no longer seek immortality through an original idea. I am more interested in making a profound impact in the lives of the people closest to me: my family, my friends, and the people I lead. If a great moment is thrust upon me by destiny, I will seize it. But if it never comes, and I have made the people I love happy, I will die a happy man.
But I seek to be like him in his appreciation of the here and the now. His careful attention to detail, his mindfulness as he takes one patient step at a time to fix his motorcycle, and his appreciation for the precision of tiny machine parts are all manifestations of his ability to focus on what he is doing at that very moment – meditation, in other words. The long journey on the motorcycle, where one is simultaneously with a traveling companion yet at the same time solitary in the experience of moving against the wind, and where the consciousness of nature is visceral and unmediated by a car window that looks like a television, is also one big meditation.
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