The detail that stays with me is the shoe store apartment and the 2-to-6 AM writing hours while holding a day job at Honeywell. That’s the part of the story that never gets romanticised — the book didn’t come from retreat or freedom, it came from the hours stolen from sleep by someone who had no reason to believe anyone would ever read it. 121 rejections and he kept going. There’s something in that stubbornness that connects to the book’s own argument about Quality — you can’t define it, you can’t prove it exists, but you know when you’re in the presence of it, and that knowing is enough to keep you at the desk at 2 AM.
damn Ted. I read this before I went to college. I loved it. But if I’d really understood it, I wouldn’t have gone to college - or better, i would have gone and then left before graduating. I may have to read Pirsig again. thanks so much for this…
Ted, you call it a “novel,” but that implies fiction (Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and other New Journalism aside). I always thought of it as a philosophical memoir. Did I miss something?
Thank you for reminding me of one of the important books of my early adulthood. I took Pirsig’s praise of Quality to heart and felt that a way had opened for me to understand what my life could be about. Logic is all well and good as a tool for discerning a limited range of truth, but the quest for Quality is open-ended, and thus a lure to embodying a greater sort (or range) of truth. Amid today’s dreary acceptance of a “post-truth” world, it shines as brightly as the well-maintained chrome on his motorcycle.
love this post. an important point on the distinction of quality from perfection - pirsig's quality more of a knowing from long relationship with a process, with a path, as a singular human, in their own particular way - like the "taming" of the fox or the rose in exupery's little prince - crafting caring over time creates obligation, as one becomes... indeed the antithesis to ai...
aside - a year abroad, buried my head in over a hundred books. read ZAAMM 5 times. doestoevsky's crime and punishment 3 times. autobiography of alice b toklas 2 maybe 3 times. some circles go round to complete...
another aside, uchicago claims its "dropouts" as "X-ers" - someone who left their program in 1967 would become an alumni noted X'67, for example - once uchicago, always uchicago...
Oh, gosh, Ted. Maybe it's because after I'd caved in, I loaded up a touring bicycle and set out east up the Columbia River valley on my own, unsupported across the country; or, have re-taken to motorcycle pilgrimaging on the fifty-year-old Triumph twin, which I maintain myself, and is my principal internal combustion transport of late; or, find myself delving into writers like McGilchrist and McCarraher (and you). Or that I put Gordon Lightfoot's "Carefree Highway" on the turntable this morning. But this recitation of yours moved me to tears.
I've read "Zen..." twice, and have a second-hand paperback copy to give to the twenty-something guy in the kitchen at the Village Deli here, who's been fascinated with my intentional rejection of this digital age as the designated 'salvation' of our modernist epoch. I'm printing out your homily here to fold up and stick in the book, too. Thanks for this.
It's about time that I reread this, too. The book helped me keep my head on straight when I was writing up my PhD. It's a book that reminds us to breathe. And that's another thing that AI can't do. It can't sit back, take a breath and assess a situation, and take sheer joy in the calm moments before settling down to the task at hand. Sometimes it's good to be human.
I'm also reminded about how much of a meme was created by "Zen and the Art of... " I know motorcycle maintenance wasn't the first time that phrase was used, but it was what spurred the the proliferation of imitations, often by people who never read the book.
Thanks so much for talking about this wonderful, unusual book. I read it for the first time as an “add on” to the syllabus in a great books program when I was an undergrad at Kenyon College in about 1976. I’m not sure the professors knew what to do with it, but we were all reading it and damn, was it relevant! A few years later I was in grad school at the University of Chicago and I met one of McKeon’s students. The student claimed that he asked McKeon about Pirsig, to which McKeon replied by pounding his fist into his other hand exclaiming, “we really got him!”
It was a bit delayed in happening, but I think Pirsig laid the groundwork for the current mass popularity of Stoicism. As the Stoics say, "arete is the only good."
Holy cow. Didn't know this. Stoicism: Another piece of floating wreckage to hang on to as I see the main deck of this ship slipping 'neath the waves. We were told by The Man that we were 'unsinkable', weren't we...
except their "arete" only includes production, and does not include the nurturance of human well-being - which includes nourishment, slowness, a safe environment, food supply, medical system, public health, and well-regulated financial system for whole-society well-being - not just their elitist aka supremacist cohort.
i argue pirsig would not exclude human well-being for the whole society, nor the health of the environment, nor balance aka humanness in our pursuits.
I don't know where you're getting those ideas from, but they do not match what I see being done currently with Stoicism. See, for example https://figsinwintertime.substack.com/
my understanding of stoicism in the current century is as a practice of privileging raw data and analysis over the meaning and reality signalled by human emotion and sensation and personal meaning
contemporary "stoics" i've seen promote "self-improvement hacks" to override human emotion and vulnerability through self-hypnosis techniques like neurolinguistic programming (nlp)
they promote "self-hack" techniques for "self-perfection" and "optimization," which promotes dissociation from emotional health and reality, grief, human imperfection, vulnerability, and integration of one's lived experiences
I had this book with me on a month long motorcycle trip from prairie Canada down the west coast and finally to Texas. It was a spiritual guide book for my 21 year old self. Thanks for the memories ☺️
I used to teach an excerpt of Zen & The Art in my History of Cool course at Tulane -- one of the riffs on Quality -- as a 1960s philosophical reading alongside the main work, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It turned out ZAMM doesn't lend itself to excerpting (so to speak). Students needed to be in the flow of his journey (and his prose) to make sense of his inquiry. I also tried longer excerpts once in my senior seminar on Existentialism, but it didn't work there either. That said, I enjoyed hearing the novel's backstory, which I did not know. Thanks for sharing.
I read this book forty years ago when I was...working as a technical illustrator. A job not unlike the one that the author held. At the time I was saturating myself with Vonnegut, and he and Heller and Pirsig helped me along my path and innoculated me (for life) against many false beliefs.
The book is a guide to motorcycle maintenance? I read the book, and I need some clarification on that statement: is it metaphorical? There is virtually no talk, or guidance, about motorcycle maintenance, and Pirsig himself, in the introduction, says some something like,"its (the book) not very factual about motorcycles either." I do remember him instructing his old friend on how to insert a shim in the friend's BMW 'cycle's handlebar central grip, the mechanism that keeps the handlebars at the intended angle. Pirsig suggested that a cut up aluminum beer can was a perfect shim . . . and then there was his visit to a welder's shop to get a small Crack in the oil pan welded, and his fascination at watching the welder's skill, his Art really, on display. I will now have to read the book again. Its been about thirty years, but I'd read and re-read it countless times then.
The Gumption Trap was the dominant motif that I recall. Not gumption, itself. Something to do with pride, ego, past expertise getting in the way, anchoring to karma, the legacy of the Sophist's defeat, leading to self-defeat, stasis, loss of lightning, loss of flow, the constipation of Chi, writer's block, what-have-you.
The detail that stays with me is the shoe store apartment and the 2-to-6 AM writing hours while holding a day job at Honeywell. That’s the part of the story that never gets romanticised — the book didn’t come from retreat or freedom, it came from the hours stolen from sleep by someone who had no reason to believe anyone would ever read it. 121 rejections and he kept going. There’s something in that stubbornness that connects to the book’s own argument about Quality — you can’t define it, you can’t prove it exists, but you know when you’re in the presence of it, and that knowing is enough to keep you at the desk at 2 AM.
Good point, and beautifully stated!
damn Ted. I read this before I went to college. I loved it. But if I’d really understood it, I wouldn’t have gone to college - or better, i would have gone and then left before graduating. I may have to read Pirsig again. thanks so much for this…
It's a novel? I thought it was a non-fiction memoir...
Ted, you call it a “novel,” but that implies fiction (Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and other New Journalism aside). I always thought of it as a philosophical memoir. Did I miss something?
Thank you for reminding me of one of the important books of my early adulthood. I took Pirsig’s praise of Quality to heart and felt that a way had opened for me to understand what my life could be about. Logic is all well and good as a tool for discerning a limited range of truth, but the quest for Quality is open-ended, and thus a lure to embodying a greater sort (or range) of truth. Amid today’s dreary acceptance of a “post-truth” world, it shines as brightly as the well-maintained chrome on his motorcycle.
This book, read many times, was a seminal read for me. Time to read again!
love this post. an important point on the distinction of quality from perfection - pirsig's quality more of a knowing from long relationship with a process, with a path, as a singular human, in their own particular way - like the "taming" of the fox or the rose in exupery's little prince - crafting caring over time creates obligation, as one becomes... indeed the antithesis to ai...
aside - a year abroad, buried my head in over a hundred books. read ZAAMM 5 times. doestoevsky's crime and punishment 3 times. autobiography of alice b toklas 2 maybe 3 times. some circles go round to complete...
another aside, uchicago claims its "dropouts" as "X-ers" - someone who left their program in 1967 would become an alumni noted X'67, for example - once uchicago, always uchicago...
Oh, gosh, Ted. Maybe it's because after I'd caved in, I loaded up a touring bicycle and set out east up the Columbia River valley on my own, unsupported across the country; or, have re-taken to motorcycle pilgrimaging on the fifty-year-old Triumph twin, which I maintain myself, and is my principal internal combustion transport of late; or, find myself delving into writers like McGilchrist and McCarraher (and you). Or that I put Gordon Lightfoot's "Carefree Highway" on the turntable this morning. But this recitation of yours moved me to tears.
I've read "Zen..." twice, and have a second-hand paperback copy to give to the twenty-something guy in the kitchen at the Village Deli here, who's been fascinated with my intentional rejection of this digital age as the designated 'salvation' of our modernist epoch. I'm printing out your homily here to fold up and stick in the book, too. Thanks for this.
Tim Long, Just Up the Hill from Lock 15
It's about time that I reread this, too. The book helped me keep my head on straight when I was writing up my PhD. It's a book that reminds us to breathe. And that's another thing that AI can't do. It can't sit back, take a breath and assess a situation, and take sheer joy in the calm moments before settling down to the task at hand. Sometimes it's good to be human.
I'm also reminded about how much of a meme was created by "Zen and the Art of... " I know motorcycle maintenance wasn't the first time that phrase was used, but it was what spurred the the proliferation of imitations, often by people who never read the book.
Thanks so much for talking about this wonderful, unusual book. I read it for the first time as an “add on” to the syllabus in a great books program when I was an undergrad at Kenyon College in about 1976. I’m not sure the professors knew what to do with it, but we were all reading it and damn, was it relevant! A few years later I was in grad school at the University of Chicago and I met one of McKeon’s students. The student claimed that he asked McKeon about Pirsig, to which McKeon replied by pounding his fist into his other hand exclaiming, “we really got him!”
It was a bit delayed in happening, but I think Pirsig laid the groundwork for the current mass popularity of Stoicism. As the Stoics say, "arete is the only good."
Holy cow. Didn't know this. Stoicism: Another piece of floating wreckage to hang on to as I see the main deck of this ship slipping 'neath the waves. We were told by The Man that we were 'unsinkable', weren't we...
Tim
except their "arete" only includes production, and does not include the nurturance of human well-being - which includes nourishment, slowness, a safe environment, food supply, medical system, public health, and well-regulated financial system for whole-society well-being - not just their elitist aka supremacist cohort.
i argue pirsig would not exclude human well-being for the whole society, nor the health of the environment, nor balance aka humanness in our pursuits.
I don't know where you're getting those ideas from, but they do not match what I see being done currently with Stoicism. See, for example https://figsinwintertime.substack.com/
thank you for the link, i will look at it
my understanding of stoicism in the current century is as a practice of privileging raw data and analysis over the meaning and reality signalled by human emotion and sensation and personal meaning
contemporary "stoics" i've seen promote "self-improvement hacks" to override human emotion and vulnerability through self-hypnosis techniques like neurolinguistic programming (nlp)
they promote "self-hack" techniques for "self-perfection" and "optimization," which promotes dissociation from emotional health and reality, grief, human imperfection, vulnerability, and integration of one's lived experiences
hence, my comment
I had this book with me on a month long motorcycle trip from prairie Canada down the west coast and finally to Texas. It was a spiritual guide book for my 21 year old self. Thanks for the memories ☺️
It affected me that way, too. At 21 I did a 13,000 mile summer motorcycle trip across the USA.
I used to teach an excerpt of Zen & The Art in my History of Cool course at Tulane -- one of the riffs on Quality -- as a 1960s philosophical reading alongside the main work, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It turned out ZAMM doesn't lend itself to excerpting (so to speak). Students needed to be in the flow of his journey (and his prose) to make sense of his inquiry. I also tried longer excerpts once in my senior seminar on Existentialism, but it didn't work there either. That said, I enjoyed hearing the novel's backstory, which I did not know. Thanks for sharing.
I read this book forty years ago when I was...working as a technical illustrator. A job not unlike the one that the author held. At the time I was saturating myself with Vonnegut, and he and Heller and Pirsig helped me along my path and innoculated me (for life) against many false beliefs.
The book is a guide to motorcycle maintenance? I read the book, and I need some clarification on that statement: is it metaphorical? There is virtually no talk, or guidance, about motorcycle maintenance, and Pirsig himself, in the introduction, says some something like,"its (the book) not very factual about motorcycles either." I do remember him instructing his old friend on how to insert a shim in the friend's BMW 'cycle's handlebar central grip, the mechanism that keeps the handlebars at the intended angle. Pirsig suggested that a cut up aluminum beer can was a perfect shim . . . and then there was his visit to a welder's shop to get a small Crack in the oil pan welded, and his fascination at watching the welder's skill, his Art really, on display. I will now have to read the book again. Its been about thirty years, but I'd read and re-read it countless times then.
I like what he has to say about gumption. Which some prefer to call morale.
The Gumption Trap was the dominant motif that I recall. Not gumption, itself. Something to do with pride, ego, past expertise getting in the way, anchoring to karma, the legacy of the Sophist's defeat, leading to self-defeat, stasis, loss of lightning, loss of flow, the constipation of Chi, writer's block, what-have-you.