Word: zen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE...
...Zen and the Art of 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...
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...
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...
...does not say so in the book. There is, in fact, not a word about his life from 1959 to the present in The Empty Mirror. It would have been interesting to learn whether he did in deed stay awake, but the silence seems right. A book about Zen should end with a question...