Word: pirsig
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Dates: during 1974-1974
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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...
...Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig...
...Pirsig's Phaedrus was a lonely man who, despite an IQ of 170, had trouble with his studies. He began at 15 as a college freshman studying science, but he soon could not keep his ability to reason within any accepted academic context. From hypotheses he would get not proofs but only more hypotheses. Because his mind kept searching for an underlying universal principle, he switched to philosophy and eventually went to India to study oriental thought. Phaedrus-Pirsig never thought small. His aim was to do nothing less than revamp the whole scientific method that operated from...
This ghostly Pirsig-past continues to haunt Pirsig-present as well as his son. There is a climactic moment when Pirsig thinks that he is again losing his grip and that Phaedrus may regain control. He decides to send the boy home by bus and check into a hospital. The boy refuses to go and begins to weep uncontrollably. Then, for the first time, father and son confront the painful truth about Phaedrus. The past and present come together, and Pirsig and Chris, who up to this point have seemed like subject and object, are united by what might...
Greasy Hands. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an unforgettable trip. It accelerates from the befuddlements of transmission linkage through Pirsig's history of Western thought to the mysteries of divine madness with scarcely a wobble. The fact that much of Pirsig's torque-wrenched dissertation echoes the quandaries that some high-energy physicists have about the nature of matter is not of primary importance. What matters most is that he communicates how very much he cares about living as a whole man and how hard he has worked at it. Indeed, the special gift...