It should first be explained that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values is only marginally about motorcycling or maintenance. Still, the elements of bikes and riding author Robert Pirsig does include are both insightful and thought-provoking.
This is essentially a diary recounting a nonfiction 17-day motorcycle road trip from Minnesota to Northern California undertaken by Pirsig, his young son, and a couple of married friends. While riding, Pirsig reflects on many subjects, most notably the ideas of a brilliant theorist named Phaedrus whose quest for ideological perfection led to mental instability and destruction.
The author’s freethinking and problem-solving skills are the same type many of us enjoy as the scenery passes swiftly by. But here’s the difference: Phaedrus, in reality, is Pirsig himself, using a pseudonym to distinguish his former life of despair from the one that he lives in 1974, when the book was written. This duality helps clarify moments of the story that are interrupted by casual narratives about culture and morals that the author identifies as “Chautauquas”. This odd fusion sounds confusing, and it may be at first, but it all comes cleverly together as the reader becomes accustomed to the author’s style.
This review originally appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of Robb Report MotorCycling. It has been slightly edited.
This peculiar entanglement of Pirsig’s two lives allows him to connect the principles of Zen, motorcycling, and motorcycle maintenance. Though separate journeys, they travel in tandem along the same roads, each needed to comprehend the other. Within this journey, we begin to understand why we, as readers, are so drawn to life on two wheels.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, now celebrating its 30th year of publication, is ultimately about relationships that exist between emotion, thought, and the physical world. As readers who ride, familiar with the release of mind and exhilaration of senses that motorcycling encourages, the book’s philosophical attributes add a depth and accessibility to otherwise intangible concepts.
