Word: pirsig
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Dates: during 1974-1974
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...Motorcycle Maintenance has some casual relationship to Eugen Herrigel's small, graceful classic, Zen in the Art of Archery (1953). Pirsig's book has more moving parts, and though it is clearly autobiographical, much of it reads like a novel. It is also a roadbook in the greasing-of-America tradition and a philosophical thriller that probes with dizzying ambition the cloven values of technological society. What makes all this unique is Pirsig's way of welding his parts to a most down-to-earth story about a troubled man and his eleven-year...
Mental Breakdown. Pirsig is no orthodox Zen Buddhist; his equivalent of a meditative tea ceremony is tuning his engine. "A study of the art of motorcycle maintenance," he says, "is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself." In an age preoccupied with sensation, Pirsig does not regard "reason" as a dirty word. His persistent message is that thinking is feeling, a view that underlies his advice about how to prepare mentally for troubleshooting an engine. Briefly, motor maintenance requires a good deal of quiet concentration so that the underlying principles of the engine are allowed to fill...
...alienating gap between subject and object that Pirsig attempts to fill. To do so he alternates philosophical discourses with descriptions of what happened on a trip that he took out West in 1968, his son Chris riding on the back of the cycle. By the time they reach Bozeman, Mont., where Pirsig once taught college English, it is apparent that his ideas have been earned at considerable cost and suffering. He reveals some frightening facts about himself. In 1961 he suffered a mental breakdown and underwent a series of shock treatments, which wiped out many of his personal memories...