Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Review From a Christian Perspective
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Reading Robert Pirsig's description of a road trip today, one feels bereft. In his 1974 autobiographical novel Zen and the Fine art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he describes an unhurried pace over 2-lane roads and through thunderstorms that accept the narrator and his companions by surprise as they ride through the N Dakota plains. They annals the miles in subtly varying marsh odors and in blackbirds spotted, rather than in coordinates ticked off. Most shocking, at that place is a kid on the back of one of the motorcycles. When was the last fourth dimension yous saw that? The travelers' exposure—to bodily adventure, to all the unknowns of the road—is absorbing to present-day readers, especially if they don't ride motorcycles. And this exposure is somehow existential in its significance: Pirsig conveys the feel of being fully in the earth, without the arbitration of devices that filter reality, smoothing its crude edges for our psychic comfort.
If such experiences experience less bachelor to u.s. at present, Pirsig would non be surprised. Already, in 1974, he offered this story as a meditation on a particular way of moving through the earth, i that felt marked for extinction. The book, which uses the narrator'due south road trip with his son and two friends as a journey of inquiry into values, became a massive all-time seller, and in the decades since its publication has inspired millions to seek their own adaptation with modernistic life, governed by neither a reflexive aversion to engineering, nor a naive faith in it. At the heart of the story is the motorcycle itself, a 1966 Honda Super Hawk. Hondas began to sell widely in America in the 1960s, inaugurating an abiding fascination with Japanese design among American motorists, and the visitor's founder, Soichiro Honda, raised the thought of "quality" to a quasi-mystical condition, coinciding with Pirsig's own efforts in Zen to articulate a "metaphysics of quality." Pirsig's writing conveys his loyalty to this automobile, a relationship of care extending over many years. I got to piece of work on several Hondas of this vintage when I ran a motorbike repair shop in Richmond, Virginia. Compared to British bikes of the aforementioned era, the Hondas seemed more refined. (My writing career grew out of these experiences—an effort to articulate the homo chemical element in mechanical piece of work.)
In the first chapter, a disagreement develops between the narrator and his riding companions, John and Sylvia, over the question of motorcycle maintenance. Robert performs his own maintenance, while John and Sylvia insist on having a professional do it. This posture of not-involvement, we soon learn, is a crucial element of their countercultural sensibility. They seek escape from "the whole organized fleck" or "the system," as the couple puts it; technology is a decease force, and the indicate of hitting the road is to get out it behind. The solution, or rather evasion, that John and Sylvia striking on for managing their revulsion at technology is to "Take it somewhere else. Don't take information technology here." The irony is they still discover themselves entangled with The Automobile—the one they sit on.
Zen and the Fine art of Motorcycle Maintenance
A narration of a summer motorbike trip undertaken past a father and his son, the volume becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions of how to alive. The narrator'due south relationship with his son leads to a powerful self-reckoning; the craft of motorbike maintenance leads to an austerely beautiful process for reconciling science, religion, and humanism
Today, we often use "engineering" to refer to systems whose inner workings are assiduously kept out of view, magical devices that offer no credible friction between the self and the world, no need to main the grubby details of their operation. The industry of our smartphones, the algorithms that guide our digital experiences from the cloud—information technology all takes place "somewhere else," just as John and Sylvia wished.
Withal lately we have begun to realize that this very opacity has opened new avenues of surveillance and manipulation. Large Tech at present orders everyday life more than deeply than John and Sylvia imagined in their techno-dystopian nightmare. Today, a road trip to "get away from it all" would depend on GPS, and would prompt digital ads tailored to our destination. The whole excursion would be mined for behavioral information and used to nudge us into assisting channels, probable without our even knowing it.
We don't know what Pirsig, who died in 2017, thought of these developments, every bit he refrained from almost interviews subsequently publishing a second novel, Lila, in 1991. Simply his narrator has left u.s.a. a way out that tin can be reclaimed by anyone venturesome plenty to endeavour information technology: He patiently attends to his ain motorbike, submits to its quirky mechanical needs and learns to understand it. His way of living with machines doesn't rely on the seductions of effortless convenience; it requires the states to get our hands muddied, to be cocky-reliant. In Zen, we see a man maintaining direct engagement with the world of textile objects, and with information technology some measure of independence—both from the purveyors of magic and from cultural despair.
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Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/robert-pirsig-zen-art-motorcycle-maintenance-resonates-today-180975768/
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