Word: pirsig
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...MONTHS ago an unknown American Man of Letters and Scientist named Robert Pirsig, an academic outcast, a thin and dishevelled middle class American who rides a BMW and makes a living writing technical manuals, published a first novel entitled Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book is a major signpost on the cultural road we have been glancing at, a massive imaginative inquiry into technology, the philosophical foundations of science and their bearings on American life. It uncovers and explores certain important hinges that lie rusted in the region of unexamined values and beliefs...
Heavy stuff for a novel. And not the kind of material you would expect to clothe an autobiographical account of a motorcycle journey west from Minneapolis to the coast. Pirsig, in fact, doesn't describe the book as a novel at all but as a "series of lecture-essays--a sort of Chautauqua...
...farmers and tradespeople that flourished in the last half of the nineteenth century. They were a cross between the travelling tent-show and the camp-meeting. They were the country relatives of the Lyceum lectures where Whitman exhorted and praised the "common man" and Emerson taught him philosophy. Pirsig's harking back to this old American institution, his one man revival of that vein of democratic oratory is not sentimental. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance offers intellectual challenge, a real critical education in the philosophy of science that sounds the concrete language and experience of contemporary "common...
...technology; it examines the diverse ways modern man relates to his mechanical environment: through embittered helplessness that generates awe and estrangement, through indifference and waste, through blind utilitarian lens and through care and insight. The attitudes are realized in narrative and description as well as in the strands of Pirsig's philosophic discourses...
...Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig...