VROOM, YAWN, RONF



Mi piacerebbe usare il tempo che ho a disposizione per parlare di alcune cose che mi sono venute in mente. Il più delle volte abbiamo tanta fretta che le occasioni per parlare sono ben poche.

Tempo a disposizione Pirsing ne aveva abbastanza: in moto, col figlio undicenne seduto dietro, dal Minnesota attraversando Dakota, Wisconsin, Montana, fino alla California, fino all’oceano Pacifico, scegliendo le back street, le strade secondarie. E quindi, senza fretta, godendo e assaporando l’andare.

Sulla carta ‘sto libro si presentava come una manna per me che ho cominciato a guidare, sia due ruote che quattro ruote, a dodici anni. Ed ero così fortunato da avere un fratello maggiore munito di Ducati Scrambler che doveva lasciare a casa durante i lunghi mesi di collegio veneziano: e quindi a dodici anni ho iniziato a guidare una Ducati e tuttora mi muovo principalmente su due ruote con motore.



Peccato che invece di godersi davvero il viaggio, o di fermarsi a far manutenzione della moto, e magari parlarmi di cilindri e pistoni, Pirsing, che di professione oltre lo scrittore fa soprattutto il filosofo, dibatta a lungo di Socrate, Platone, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Einstein, Lao Tzu, che a me piacevano molto al liceo, ma dopo non ho più voluto saperne.

Come se non bastasse, Pirsig avvolge tutto nel buddismo zen. Di male in peggio.
E quindi queste parti del libro non le ho godute affatto, gran voglia di saltarle, di passare a quelle sul suono del motore, il senso di una piega, l’aria in faccia, che sono poche, purtroppo, davvero poche. Abbondano e vincono quelle dedicate alla teoria della Qualità, quelle riempite di metafisica.



E la colpa è tutta di John e Sylvia, i due amici di Pirsig che viaggiavano con padre e figlio: due motociclette in viaggio per 80/100 pagine. Una meraviglia. Poi la coppia di amici, John e Sylvya, si fermano a casa di altri amici, restano lì, e son solo Pirsig e il figlio a ripartire. E da quel punto, forse perché sente la mancanza della coppia d’amici, forse perché la conversazione dell’undicenne era poco stimolante – ma in moto si tace, mica si chiacchiera – Pirsig si mette a fare il filosofo e sbrodolare di filosofia e peggio ancora di zen, e così mi ha perso. O io ho perso lui.
Peccato.

Col seguito uscito ventisette anni dopo non ho voluto ritentare: anche perché da quel che ho capito nel secondo la moto è scomparsa, anche solo come scusa. Ma è rimasta la filosofia. Tanta (Lila: un’indagine sulla morale).
Mi chiedo se i diari di viaggio del malefico Dibba nazionale si siano ispirati a questo tomo mattoncino.

I worked in a bookstore for two years of my youth, and, though I have many memories of my time in that store, I don't remember too many of our customers.

I remember one, though. He was kind of a weird dude, just a few years older than I was, with a certain intensity and a really deep voice. He shopped regularly in our store, typically in the sci-fi section, and one day, as I was taking inventory at the register, he picked up ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE and said, “Oh, a must-read.”

I looked at it, and I'm sure I was thinking “Really?” but I said something instead, like “Why?”

He looked down at it with affection and said something like, “I've already read it a few times. It's brilliant. Make sure you read it at some point in your life.”

Well, “at some point” during this 1970s reading project of mine, I had a flashback of this conversation, and, because I'm trying to embrace more non-fiction these days, I added it.

Grumble. . . grumble. . . grumble.

Look, I feel for this author, Robert Pirsig. At one point in his life, he had a complete psychotic breakdown and was treated for paranoid schizophrenia and received electroconvulsive therapy. Apparently he struggled to keep those wolves at bay for the rest of his life.

  

He has my compassion, but the thing is. . . I might have a complete psychotic breakdown if I keep reading this.

This book deserves to be read by someone far wiser and far more mechanical than I am.

I thought it was a metaphor, this motorcycle maintenance thing. Seriously. I didn't realize that the book would involve actual motorcycle maintenance.

God, help me.

I mean. . . even a shirtless Viggo Mortensen might bore me if he turned to me and asked me to adjust his “tappet” and whatnot. I'd be like, “Dude, I'll be inside the air conditioned diner, looking for alcohol.”



(I take it back, Viggo, I take it back!!)

And what's with this Robert Pirsig, talking to the grown-ass woman, Sylvia, on their road trip, like she's a 12-year-old? She's like a freaking college professor and he keeps telling her when to look at the scenery and when to rest. Ugh! She's not your child, she's a grown woman. Shut up!

There's some fabulous philosophical reflections here, and some great one-liners, but I've hit the halfway mark, and I must be done.

I'm grouchy now and I'm reminded of all of the loud motorcycles that woke me up on my beach “vacation” last week. Shut up!

Maybe I am just not spiritual enough to appreciate Pirsig's critically acclaimed best selling cult classic? A fictional account centred on a philosophical look at the idea of quality, a motorcycle journey and the nature of the main character. 3 out of 12, One Star read.

2013 read

I feel like Robert M. Pirsig has wronged me personally.

There are three threads weaving through this book, none of which, as is cheerfuly owned in the text, has much to do with eastern philosophy or motorcycle maintenance. (And I have no problem with that intentional irony.)

The first thread is a straightforward narration by a man riding cross-country with his young son and two friends (a married couple). This travelogue is evocative and engaging and by far the most enjoyable aspect of the novel. It had me fantasizing about buying a Harley and riding Route 66.

The second element is a mystery story. It's gradually revealed that the narrator is struggling with amnesia; his road trip is an attempt to escape something terrible in his past but ironically, also to stimulate his memory and remember that past.

So far, so good.

Sigh.

The last thread is where the book just falls apart. Through the narrator's dialogue with himself, Pirsig puts forward his "philosophy of quality," which essentially holds that "quality," whatever that might be, is somehow the fundamental essence of Reality. Uhm. What? The only part of the Universe that isn't instant death is a thin film on the surface of an infinitesimal pebble, but Reality exists to appeal to the sensibilities of the apes living on that pebble? Again, what?

Anyway.

When we find out why the narrator had lost his memory in the first place, the answers are just ... disappointing.

I learned from this book that you can sell a billion copies of a book that no one should ever waste three minutes reading. This is just another neo-philosophy book disguised as a novel. I'm almost convinced that the only reason people buy this book is so that their pseudo-intellectual (read: pompous scumbag) friends will accept them into the hippie circle. Although I know about twenty people who claim to have read this book, I have yet to meet a single person who actually knows what it's about. This book is a bigger hoax than the bible. So I have written, and so, therefore, must it be.

Okay, I confess I haven't finished it yet. But I'm finding it so irksome I don't know if I'll be able to get all the way through it. Here's what I wrote on my bookmark 50 pages in:
"the author's logic is self-contained, entirely self-referential and so his argument is self-sustaining! He can set up armies of logical strawmen and have them elaborately duke it out in massive rhetorical battles taking place entirely without any grounding in reality.
He has the manic ADDH intelligence of the kind that experiences UFO abductions, never finishes his degree, judges everyone as hopelessly inferior from behind the counter of the sporting goods store. Self-satisfied and superior with a fake Indian name he took on from the time he made deep eye-contact with a timber wolf. The kind of guy who never made it all the way back from 'Nam."

So that was 100 pages ago and I've had to change my evaluation a little. He went to Korea, not Vietnam.

He's driving me NUTS! It's one false premise and false conclusion after another-- astonishing leaps of logic (e.g. the more I do experiments, the more ideas for future experiments I have, therefore science only leads to more questions, therefore scientific pursuit is meaningless since the purpose of science is to know everything, and if I always have more questions, I'll never know everything. AAARGH!)

He's an irritating narrator: his female companions ooh and aah at his speechifying. "Gee, Bob, how do you think of this stuff!" while bringing him steaks. His male companions are awed and impressed with his technical knowledge and mystical skills. He wasn't kicked out of school for "laziness and immaturity" as the official reason went-- it was because his ideas were so RADICAL the whole university system would have come toppling down!

The only expert he cites is Phaedrus....who turns out to be himself! Before a nervous breakdown! He talks about discovering the beautiful power of Phaedrus' logic and writing. And it's himself, all along. Very annoying.

Ugh. I just want to say to him, yes, you're very smart. Yes, technology and art are a false dichotomy. But no, saying that does not turn the world inside out and make your the smartest person in the universe.

I must start by saying that this is one of my favorite books ever. Although it is deep and complicated and takes a lot of focus to read, I feel that there are a lot of great messages here in the author’s search for Quality. This was my second time reading this book, and I liked it more this time.
tInterlaced with stories from an across-the-west motorcycle trip with his son and some friends, Pirsig tells the story of his past in an almost former life before being admitted to a mental institution after going crazy in his pursuit of Quality. He often uses the motorcycle as an analogy, as well as climbing mountains. With what many would see as too much depth and detail (but not me), he dissects the ideas of rhetoric, quality, the scientific method, technology and many ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers and tries to take down an entire academic department in the search of a unifying truth/god/connecting force.
I don’t really feel that there is a lot that I can say to do this book justice in a short review form like this. I’ll just write up a bunch of underlined quotes instead.

“…physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much.”

“Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.”

“That’s the first normal thing I’ve said in weeks. The rest of the time I’m feigning twentieth-century lunacy just like you are. So as to not draw attention to myself.”

“Nobody is concerned anymore about tidily conserving space. The land isn’t valuable anymore. We are in a Western town.”

“But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government , but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”

“If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.”

“Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.”

“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.”

“But what’s happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we’re getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought – occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like – because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.”

“The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn’t the way it ever is. People should see that it’s never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It’s never been anything else, ever, but you can’t get that across in an essay.”

“The allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there’s no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.”

“He was just stopped. Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything.”

“Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster… When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it’s a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That’s never the way.”

“The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take.”

“Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.”

“They have patience, care and attentiveness to what they’re doing, but more than this – there’s a kind of inner peace of mind that isn’t contrived but results from a kind of harmony with the work in which there’s no leader and no follower. The material and the craftsman’s thoughts change together in a progression of smooth, even changes until his mind is at rest at the exact instant the material is right.”

“Or if he takes whatever dull job he’s stuck with – and they are all, sooner or later, dull – and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he’s likely to discover he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others, too, because the Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn’t think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.
My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that’s all.God, I don’t want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. There’s a place for them but they’ve got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. We’ve had that individual quality in the past, exploited as a natural resource without knowing it, and now it’s just about depleted. Everyone’s just about out if gumption. And I think it’s about time to return the rebuilding of this American resource – individual worth. There are political reactionaries who’ve been saying something close to this for years. I’m not one of them, but to the extent they’re talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich, they’re right. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.”

“What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good – need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”

Plato's Phaedrus said, "And what is written well and what is written badly...need we ask Lysias or any other poet or orator who ever wrote or will write either a political or other work, in meter or out of meter, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?"

Modern Phaedrus said, “And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”

I keep re-reading passages from Zen and the Art and Tao of Pooh and Siddhartha and try to make sense in the context of everyday life (which is where I firmly believe any philosophical questions need to be answered - If it is not applicable in your kitchen, it is not real philosophy) and quite strangely the answers seem to come from tying in the learning from these metaphysical and spiritual works with a book like The Story of Stuff - neither a great book nor a literary achievement or a leap in thinking - but it helped me understand the real meaning of the word 'materialism' when I read it in parallel with these other books. I will try to give an expanded review soon as a blog post at my blog

And Then? "I am Phædrus, that is who I am, and they are going to destroy me for speaking the Truth."

You can sort of tell these things...

When I was quite young my brain said to me, after a particularly long and stoned session listening to Pink Floyd and discussing philosophy, 'oh give me a break'. So I said to my brain, 'there's no need to be so rude,' and my brain said, 'no seriously, I can't handle this anymore, really, let me take a break'. So it did and I've been operating on brain-stem alone ever since. I don't know it's made that much difference.

I wonder if the author's brain was thinking like mine was?

Certainly when I was reading this book and sort of enjoying it (2 stars-worth), I was also thinking I am just too old to be reading this sort of cod-philosophy, too old and not stoned enough. I read other people's reviews and have to conclude that they all saw something in this book that impressed them as deep and me as deeply populist. Either way, I didn't really enjoy it and it only gets two stars because the writing was ok, the book wasn't arduous to read, some parts of it were interesting and enjoyable.

I wasn't that keen on the author's exploration of his mental breakdown either. I find when other people tell me the dreams they had last night, or I have to read them in a book I turn off as well. I really don't know why, nor do I know if others also feel this way. When telling last night's major really interesting dream to someone else, I've never said, "Do you find this as boring as I would if it was you telling me?" Actually that's a load of guff, I don't tell other people my dreams because I suspect they would be bored rigid and neither do I tell them about my mental breakdown when I saw three rainbows in the sky and didn't kill myself because I couldn't find a nightie that was suitable. See, boring!

I kept thinking that Roberts (the author of Shantaram) and Pirsig would get on really well. They could sit in cafes in foreign parts swapping tales of derring-do, drugs and their fascinating insights whilst waiting for an audience to join them. That's a bit mean-spirited as Pirsig is a great deal more appealing as an author and person than the somewhat sleazy Roberts, but I think you get what I mean. And I will say that it's quite readable, the travel descriptions are very well done, the characters, apart from the hero, are in general interesting but... I still couldn't get into it.

Anyway, it's a Sunday, much love and an extra star!

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: "I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning."

I have read Zen probably four or five times. The clinical precision of the author is apparent in all the detail here ("left grip", "eight-thirty"). The self-reference of the author looking at his own watch will become a leitmotif as the entire book is about the author looking deep into his own soul (so deep in fact that the real author became temporarily insane between finishing Zen and starting the sequel Lila.) The author is definitely a morning kind of a guy, already rolling down the highway early in the morning. The fact that he looks without taking his hand off the grip, gives us a very cinematic presentation of this otherwise banal scene. Also, the mundane nature of riding a motorcycle and looking at a watch and finding the even important enough to write about centres us on the cycle itself and foreshadows the many allusions and allegories that will come between philosophy and cycling.

There is an extended analogy between the state of mind of Pirsig as he tunes and tweaks his motorcycle and his concept of quality as the leading edge of a train in time. I always found it helpful to recall and think about.

The relationship between Pirsig and his son is a focal point of this book and poignant without faltering towards the pathetic. There was a very great tragedy in Pirsig's life when his son was killed some years later, and naturally, Pirsig's already feeble mental state was shattered again. This book takes place during the son's adolescence and it is striking to see how these two communicate and how Pirsig is eventually able to connect with him.

This book is a great introduction to philosophy, particularly Zen Buddhism and I get something more out of it each time I read it. Truly a masterpiece. I highly recommend also reading his follow-up book to this called Lila.

Zen for me remains a go to book for solace and reflection. I deeply mourn the passage of Pirsig as a misunderstood and under-estimated thinker and writer. R.I.P.

This book is extremely good and also important. It's a treatise on metaphysics as well as a compelling story which the author says is autobiographical. It's exactly right about the scientific method, and the way we go about discovering truth as a society and as individuals. The analogy of working on motorcycles is a good one. In my life it's been programming computers and figuring out how to get industrial machinery to work, but the same process works for all of the above.

The thing I find most excellent in this book is that it points out the step where the mystery comes in, i.e. coming up with new hypotheses, the long sought "aha" that comes when you're working on a hard problem. Science has no method for how you get that. You just play with the problem, turn it over in your mind, try things, strive to understand, and then  the answer sometimes appears in your head. It's a complete mystery. There are stories in the history of science, about Kekule who figured out the ring structure of Benzene from a dream about a snake swallowing its tail, about Einstein at age 13 picturing what it would be like to ride the crest of a light wave, and on and on. This book showed me that buried in the heart of science is something generative and alive that defies scientific explanation, simply because it's outside the system.

"The truth knocks on your door, and you say 'Go away! I'm looking for the truth!' so it goes away." That's such an exact description of how our preconceived ideas often keep us from finding the truth. (The truth in this context is completely knowable once we've found it. I mean if the motorcycle runs afterwards, then we've solved the problem. That's why I love applied science and engineering.)

The other great idea that I use all the time from this book is that the very cutting edge, the place where the tire tread hits the pavement, is always messy and confusing and just a place of floundering around in uncertainty. He makes the analogy of a train, with all the cars full of facts that we know, and the engine, where new track is being laid, is not contained in any of the cars. It's always murky up there, and never neat and well-defined. So that unpleasant feeling of uncertainty, of confusion, of floundering around, it's the VERY THING that we should cultivate in order to discover the truth. I tell myself that when I'm in that situation, that I should revel in this feeling instead of dreading it. (And, in fact, I mostly get paid because I can stick through that feeling to the payoff, the "aha" part. The most important thing I learned in college is that something utterly confusing and befuddling can come clear if I will invest the effort to play around with it and figure it out. So I get to do that all the time now. =))

What I have found in the years of figuring out why programs or machines don't work, and fixing them, is that really very little in life and the universe is well-understood. We have this large mental construct of scientific understanding, and it's indeed impressive. We can cure typhoid now and build bridges that stay up (conscious irony). But even in the areas that we would like to think are very well known, and neat and clear, there is so much that isn't understood. Otherwise, why would these questions come up continually? Why doesn't this program work? Why is my pulper feed system not working the way we expected? Why did my motorcycle engine run so badly in the mountains? What made this bridge suddenly collapse during rush hour?

This book explores all of those ideas and sheds a lot of light on them. I understand the universe far better because of having read this book. That's why I gave it 5 stars, a rating I reserve for books that changed who I am or how I see the world.