Word: pirsig
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Dates: during 1974-1974
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...MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE by Robert M. Pirsig. A haunting memoir by a father who has recovered from a breakdown and tries to protect his young son from the man he once...
...Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig...
Like the Chautauqua and Lyceum orators, Pirsig is an inveterate moralist. In common with Emerson and the other nineteenth century American Romantics he bemoans the predicament of manufactured man and extolls "self-reliance" and "gumption" and the kind of knowledge that is not to be found in books but only at the cutting edge of experience. But Pirsig also recognizes that "self-reliance" has become the philosophy of American greed and reaction and that the familiar Romantic exhortations about experience and immediacy do not penetrate very far into technology nor into its scientific underpinning. For him the problem is that...
BENEATH HIS POMPOSITY and seeming scorn Sir Charles was in earnest. And he probably did search hard for a writer probing the same problems that engaged him. I wonder if he would have embraced Robert Pirsig delivering his own "talks" from the seat of an old high-miler. I do not know enough about science or philosophy to assess Pirsig's originality from that perspective, but he did not write the book to be weighed in as a philosopher. The autobiographical threads that connect his chautauquas possess the urgency of self-revelation. An attempt to exorcize and thrash the "ghost...
...good thing about a Chautauqua is that you can understand it as well as your neighbor and share it with him; that is Pirsig achievement. In the only decent sense of the word, he has class...