Word: zen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
...last of these attitudes--care and insight--are embodied in the "good mechanic's" relation to the machine. Here enters the "Zen" of the title, in the attentiveness and patience, the carefully attained identification with his work that characterize a good mechanic: "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." The good mechanic becomes our own down-home counterpart of the Zen archer...
PIRSIG IS unabashed and maybe naive in his echoes and borrowings. He mines ideas, allusions, archetypes and symbols not only from Zen, but from Greek, German and Christian mythology, from films and novels of the American Road and from the scores of scientists and philosophers who populate his "talks." After setting Aristotle in a historical context he inserts him into American experience by likening the philosopher to a "third-rate technical instructor, naming everything, showing the relationships among the things named, cleverly inventing an occasional new relationship... and then waiting for the bell so he can get on to repeat...
...Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig