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…
I read it my freshman year in Bozeman at msu. Our professor invited Pirsig’s nephew, a local potter, as a guest lecturer. I don’t remember it all clearly, but 4 years later i was inspired to buy a second hand 500cc Royal Enfield and ride from Denver to LA. Like Hunter Thompson in Hell’ sAngels, there is an Edge a certain kind of man seeks to peek over at risk of falling off the cliff.
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.
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.
The part of that book that always stuck with me was when he was looking at the highway and it’s bumper to bumper traffic and realized he was outside of that world and going to travel a kind of parallel universe. He and his traveling companions decided that they’d take back roads. I loved reading about the towns they stopped in, the storms they road through.
A while back I read that Persig said that only about 25% of the people who read the book really get it.
Also, there’s a book called Guidebook to ZATAOMM that I believe, and someone correct me if I’m wrong, Persig endorsed that helped explain the philosophy behind it.
I had a professor of Philosophy 101 unsuccessfully dissuade me from considering ZatAoMM too highly or from taking it too seriously - particularly the defense of the Sophists - as the book in his view belonged in the self-help section. That caused me to lose some respect for his claim to authority in that moment.
[I've come to feel that if a Philosopher doesn't know how to draft with compass and T, indicating a physiological understanding of Euclid, nor know the fundamentals of music as an experience of harmony and its variants, they are no better than the slippery Sophists in that professor's rear view assessment. All truth statements must derive from those two domains and their geometry. A culture that believes in No-Universal-Truth, I surmise, has simply lost its geometry tradition, whether in graphic figure or manifest in sound. Musicians, particularly in oral-tending cultures, seem to have the best sense of what is real and good, even those with bad taste or cantankerous dispositions.]
Academic antiquarians - even the young ones today - seem to take a similar view of Joseph Campbell, for example, who could only get 'A Hero With A Thousand Faces' published within the belly-button pondering self-help genre, which is a shame and necessary evil. The contemporary academy on the humanities side ironically tends to favor dead knowledge that is bone-fide in hi-fidelity exclusively as born out by the registered paper-trail, alone, better if it has no applicability in contemporary life. The schools have lost all interest in testing for application old knowledge, tolerating ambiguity or recognizing that sometimes virtue and truth can be found even through misinterpretation, mental seizure, or shadow. They forget or smugly deny that Descartes was directed to recognize "All is Number" by an angel who visited him in a barn at night; a secularist assumes perhaps 'in a dream,' but this a distinction without difference.
The unchallenged 'philosophy' inherent to the STEM side of the academy, on the other hand? Apply it thoughtlessly away! Obey obey obey.
As McLuhan put it in Understanding Media p.118, "For the specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy." What good is studying the alchemists and mystics, if you don't attempt to get your hands dirty and seek the proverbial gold for yourself?
This seems to be what Pirsig was onto. If you do not ride the motorcycle & be with it when it breaks, you will certainly not learn how it works, let alone how to repair it. To say nothing of the freedom bestowed by all three activities, of which you are guaranteed to remain ignorant and imprisoned, should you commit to sedentary passive contemplation in avoidance of the road.
Joseph Campbell's scholarship is on the level of "I'll make a 'profound' assertion that sounds like genius but has no grounding in fact." One of his grand fallacies is that all religions have a resurrected god-hero.
Blind faith in the collective Progress of Civilization is the "grand fallacy" that McLuhan was referring to.
The specialist outsources discernment and navigation to someone assigned that task. A guy on a motorcycle can't afford to do that. He has to know where he's going and why, even if he's light on specifics. And he has to have techniques for coping with set-back and loss, should catastrophe strike. A specialist has professionals for that; amputation, not resurrection, is their stock in trade. They have no interest in the whole person, and believe it to be a myth.
Great back story, Ted, thank you. Does anyone know if his relationship with his son is at all reflected in the narrative?
I read Zen and the Art more than thirty years ago and found the first 2/3 a good critique on Western thinking but the last third … just vague and circular. It was maddening for Pirsig to go on and on (and on) about Quality while never truly defining it. Indeed, he could’ve learned more from those who gone before and perhaps been a bit more self critiquing towards his own assumptions. But nonetheless — a singular book.
A perspicaceous analysis! I especially appreciate your "musician" comment....I hear so many young jazz players who are all up in the clouds with theory and complex structures, and can't swing their ass out of a paper bag. All that atmospheric stuff is fine for the ones who have a clue, but for the increasing numbers of the clueless, you have to get them tapping their foot before anything else.
But this in 1974 and the twin cylinder 305 Honda he rode is a simple engine. He overloaded that poor bike and did 90mph with his 11 year old son of the back. John called it “the little mosquito” and yeah, I’m sure it looked pretty funny and dangerous.
Today’s machine(s) are complicated as in very. Points? Like he mentions John not carrying a spare set of? Not relevant. Black boxes have replaced them. If they quit, you have few choices. My first Honda had points and an arrangement. It would let me ride it for a while if I pushed it home. This is in ‘75. I learned to work on my machine in quiet desperation but that’s what we all do anyway as humans. You get used to it. Most of us anyway.
Technology is a double edged sword but one can’t argue that a 200 hp, 500 lbs machine that stops and handles well is a kick to ride.
As for me, I don’t even want to ride a new bike because I might not want to get on my old bikes anymore. At however many pesos per hour for upkeep these days I shudder to think. I haven’t brought a vehicle in since 2005. That works for me but not so much for others.
Although I have to say, my 70s and 80s bikes are instant conversations starters when out and about. Any chance I get to head out into the fray and talk with fellow combatants in lighthearted fashion I grab. I may look like an old grumpy garden gnome but I’m quick with a joke and a smile. Pirsig was right about a lot of things but he also was wrong about others. His reason was pure, I think; he wanted John and others to be less frustrated with technology through understanding. If your car doesn’t start it’s frustrating, but if you know it’s because you didn’t turn the key it’s less so than if the engine is blown.
But it takes more than reason to instill aptitude and inclination. I’ve long ceased trying for good reason. Just do whatever and try to have fun.
Improving oneself is the best way to improve humankind, he’s right, but my 70 years seems to suggest that better have tried. My mechanical mind tells me it’s more individual intermittent component failure rather than a complete and utter breakdown.
Who are today’s hero’s I’m not sure. Maybe it’s people like Pirsig who never say a normal thing and burn from within a la Kerouac and the nutcases he hung around with. If you see any of them around, tell them I said hi.
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.
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!”
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 loved the book and read it several times. When I first heard of it as a young woman, it seemed to be just a trendy book on a hippie topic. But it became a favorite. It seems crazy that he had to approach 121 editors who ultimately rejected it. Lila was also a wonderful book where he substituted a sailboat for a motorcycle. Thanks so much for this essay. It contextualized his process nicely.
Editors dread originality especially original thought. Just to get anywhere in the field of English literature you have to completely misunderstand what it's all actually about. It's certainly not about competitive success. It's much kinder than that. Which is presumably why people read it.
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?
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...
My own alma mater uses the same X for old dropouts; but it doesn't convey any disrespect. It may have a connection to the old legend, probably true (my own ancient memory fails to give a verdict), that in freshman orientation talks there was a point at which everyone was told to the people on the left and right and consider that only one of three would graduate from the place. And in fact, a lot of people would hang on and graduate and do well (e.g. resulting in a large production of Rhodes Scholars etc), while others would drop (usually transfer) out and also do well and in many cases have good memories of their time there.
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.
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.
Beautifully said!
Had the same reaction. I wasn't aware of those details -- and what a revelation!
Good point, and beautifully stated!
121 rejections at a time when the submissions wouldn’t just have been a bunch of cc’d mails and digital attachments. That’s some self-belief.
I think U.S. Supreme Court justice, Potter Stewart, had the same idea when he talked about obscenity.
Nice! 'I know it when I see it' says it all. I think.
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…
I read it my freshman year in Bozeman at msu. Our professor invited Pirsig’s nephew, a local potter, as a guest lecturer. I don’t remember it all clearly, but 4 years later i was inspired to buy a second hand 500cc Royal Enfield and ride from Denver to LA. Like Hunter Thompson in Hell’ sAngels, there is an Edge a certain kind of man seeks to peek over at risk of falling off the cliff.
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
Anyway, it beats Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Which was required reading for me in college…🙄🤷🏼♀️❓
Seagull? What college?
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.
"Zen in the Art of Archery" (1953), by Eugen Herrigel, is the first use of this formulation that I can find.
Like Thomas Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite.
I need to re-read that!
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.
The part of that book that always stuck with me was when he was looking at the highway and it’s bumper to bumper traffic and realized he was outside of that world and going to travel a kind of parallel universe. He and his traveling companions decided that they’d take back roads. I loved reading about the towns they stopped in, the storms they road through.
A while back I read that Persig said that only about 25% of the people who read the book really get it.
Also, there’s a book called Guidebook to ZATAOMM that I believe, and someone correct me if I’m wrong, Persig endorsed that helped explain the philosophy behind it.
I had a professor of Philosophy 101 unsuccessfully dissuade me from considering ZatAoMM too highly or from taking it too seriously - particularly the defense of the Sophists - as the book in his view belonged in the self-help section. That caused me to lose some respect for his claim to authority in that moment.
[I've come to feel that if a Philosopher doesn't know how to draft with compass and T, indicating a physiological understanding of Euclid, nor know the fundamentals of music as an experience of harmony and its variants, they are no better than the slippery Sophists in that professor's rear view assessment. All truth statements must derive from those two domains and their geometry. A culture that believes in No-Universal-Truth, I surmise, has simply lost its geometry tradition, whether in graphic figure or manifest in sound. Musicians, particularly in oral-tending cultures, seem to have the best sense of what is real and good, even those with bad taste or cantankerous dispositions.]
Academic antiquarians - even the young ones today - seem to take a similar view of Joseph Campbell, for example, who could only get 'A Hero With A Thousand Faces' published within the belly-button pondering self-help genre, which is a shame and necessary evil. The contemporary academy on the humanities side ironically tends to favor dead knowledge that is bone-fide in hi-fidelity exclusively as born out by the registered paper-trail, alone, better if it has no applicability in contemporary life. The schools have lost all interest in testing for application old knowledge, tolerating ambiguity or recognizing that sometimes virtue and truth can be found even through misinterpretation, mental seizure, or shadow. They forget or smugly deny that Descartes was directed to recognize "All is Number" by an angel who visited him in a barn at night; a secularist assumes perhaps 'in a dream,' but this a distinction without difference.
The unchallenged 'philosophy' inherent to the STEM side of the academy, on the other hand? Apply it thoughtlessly away! Obey obey obey.
As McLuhan put it in Understanding Media p.118, "For the specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy." What good is studying the alchemists and mystics, if you don't attempt to get your hands dirty and seek the proverbial gold for yourself?
This seems to be what Pirsig was onto. If you do not ride the motorcycle & be with it when it breaks, you will certainly not learn how it works, let alone how to repair it. To say nothing of the freedom bestowed by all three activities, of which you are guaranteed to remain ignorant and imprisoned, should you commit to sedentary passive contemplation in avoidance of the road.
Good point. This book would never get published today, or as you said, be watered down into a self-help manual.
Joseph Campbell's scholarship is on the level of "I'll make a 'profound' assertion that sounds like genius but has no grounding in fact." One of his grand fallacies is that all religions have a resurrected god-hero.
Thank you for illustrating my point.
Blind faith in the collective Progress of Civilization is the "grand fallacy" that McLuhan was referring to.
The specialist outsources discernment and navigation to someone assigned that task. A guy on a motorcycle can't afford to do that. He has to know where he's going and why, even if he's light on specifics. And he has to have techniques for coping with set-back and loss, should catastrophe strike. A specialist has professionals for that; amputation, not resurrection, is their stock in trade. They have no interest in the whole person, and believe it to be a myth.
Great back story, Ted, thank you. Does anyone know if his relationship with his son is at all reflected in the narrative?
I read Zen and the Art more than thirty years ago and found the first 2/3 a good critique on Western thinking but the last third … just vague and circular. It was maddening for Pirsig to go on and on (and on) about Quality while never truly defining it. Indeed, he could’ve learned more from those who gone before and perhaps been a bit more self critiquing towards his own assumptions. But nonetheless — a singular book.
A perspicaceous analysis! I especially appreciate your "musician" comment....I hear so many young jazz players who are all up in the clouds with theory and complex structures, and can't swing their ass out of a paper bag. All that atmospheric stuff is fine for the ones who have a clue, but for the increasing numbers of the clueless, you have to get them tapping their foot before anything else.
Berklee School of Music : jazz :: MFA : writing
But this in 1974 and the twin cylinder 305 Honda he rode is a simple engine. He overloaded that poor bike and did 90mph with his 11 year old son of the back. John called it “the little mosquito” and yeah, I’m sure it looked pretty funny and dangerous.
Today’s machine(s) are complicated as in very. Points? Like he mentions John not carrying a spare set of? Not relevant. Black boxes have replaced them. If they quit, you have few choices. My first Honda had points and an arrangement. It would let me ride it for a while if I pushed it home. This is in ‘75. I learned to work on my machine in quiet desperation but that’s what we all do anyway as humans. You get used to it. Most of us anyway.
Technology is a double edged sword but one can’t argue that a 200 hp, 500 lbs machine that stops and handles well is a kick to ride.
As for me, I don’t even want to ride a new bike because I might not want to get on my old bikes anymore. At however many pesos per hour for upkeep these days I shudder to think. I haven’t brought a vehicle in since 2005. That works for me but not so much for others.
Although I have to say, my 70s and 80s bikes are instant conversations starters when out and about. Any chance I get to head out into the fray and talk with fellow combatants in lighthearted fashion I grab. I may look like an old grumpy garden gnome but I’m quick with a joke and a smile. Pirsig was right about a lot of things but he also was wrong about others. His reason was pure, I think; he wanted John and others to be less frustrated with technology through understanding. If your car doesn’t start it’s frustrating, but if you know it’s because you didn’t turn the key it’s less so than if the engine is blown.
But it takes more than reason to instill aptitude and inclination. I’ve long ceased trying for good reason. Just do whatever and try to have fun.
Improving oneself is the best way to improve humankind, he’s right, but my 70 years seems to suggest that better have tried. My mechanical mind tells me it’s more individual intermittent component failure rather than a complete and utter breakdown.
Who are today’s hero’s I’m not sure. Maybe it’s people like Pirsig who never say a normal thing and burn from within a la Kerouac and the nutcases he hung around with. If you see any of them around, tell them I said hi.
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.
It's a novel? I thought it was a non-fiction memoir...
It's kind of halfway in between, being drawn primarily from Pirsig's own experiences.
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!”
This book, read many times, was a seminal read for me. Time to read again!
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 loved the book and read it several times. When I first heard of it as a young woman, it seemed to be just a trendy book on a hippie topic. But it became a favorite. It seems crazy that he had to approach 121 editors who ultimately rejected it. Lila was also a wonderful book where he substituted a sailboat for a motorcycle. Thanks so much for this essay. It contextualized his process nicely.
Editors dread originality especially original thought. Just to get anywhere in the field of English literature you have to completely misunderstand what it's all actually about. It's certainly not about competitive success. It's much kinder than that. Which is presumably why people read it.
A sailboat and a young woman if I recall correctly 🙂
Yes!
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?
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...
My own alma mater uses the same X for old dropouts; but it doesn't convey any disrespect. It may have a connection to the old legend, probably true (my own ancient memory fails to give a verdict), that in freshman orientation talks there was a point at which everyone was told to the people on the left and right and consider that only one of three would graduate from the place. And in fact, a lot of people would hang on and graduate and do well (e.g. resulting in a large production of Rhodes Scholars etc), while others would drop (usually transfer) out and also do well and in many cases have good memories of their time there.
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.