Word: zens
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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...
...Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig
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...