Zen and the Art

Reading Pirsig now

A few years ago, the Smithsonian museum in Washington DC acquired the bike that Robert Pirsig rode on the road trip that provides the narrative frame for his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. They asked me to write an essay about it for the Smithsonian magazine. The essay has now been used as a forward for the 50th anniversary edition of Zen, which has just come out. I have revised it further and present it here to paying subscribers to Archedelia.

-Matt

Reading Robert Pirsig’s description of a road trip today, one feels bereft. In his 1974 autobiographical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he describes an unhurried pace over two-lane roads. Thunderstorms take the narrator and his companions by surprise as they ride through the North Dakota plains, registering the miles in subtly varying marsh odors and in blackbirds spotted, rather than in coordinates ticked off.

Most shocking, there is a child on the back of one of the motorcycles. When was the last time you saw that? The travelers’ exposure—to bodily hazard, to all the unknowns of the road—is arresting to present-day readers. And this exposure is somehow existential in its significance: Pirsig conveys the experience of being fully in the world, without the mediation of devices that filter reality or smooth its rough edges for our psychic comfort.

If such experiences feel less available to us now, Pirsig would not be surprised. Already, in 1974, he offered this story as a meditation on a particular way of moving through the world, one that felt marked for extinction. The book, which uses the narrator’s road trip with his son and two friends as a journey of “inquiry into values,” became a massive bestseller, and in the decades since its publication has inspired millions to seek their own accommodation with modern life, governed by neither a reflexive aversion to technology, nor a naive faith in it.