Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

We pass through a town called Marmarth but John doesn’t stop even for a rest and so we go on. More furnace heat, into some badlands, and we cross the border into Montana. A sign by the road announces it.

Sylvia waves her arms up and down and I beep the horn in response, but when I look at the sign my feelings are not jubilant at all. For me its information causes a sudden inward tension that can’t exist for them. They’ve no way of knowing we’re now in the country where he lived.

All this talk so far about classic and romantic understanding must seem a strangely oblique way of describing him, but to get at Phædrus, this oblique route is the only one to take. To describe his physical appearance or the statistics of his life would be to dwell on misleading superficialities. And to come at him directly would be to invite disaster.

He was insane. And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he’s insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at it. Otherwise your own opinions block the way. There is only one access to him that I can see as passable and we still have a way to go.

I’ve been going into all this business of analyses and definitions and hierarchies not for their own sake but to lay the groundwork for an understanding of the direction in which Phædrus went.

I told Chris the other night that Phædrus spent his entire life pursuing a ghost. That was true. The ghost he pursued was the ghost that underlies all of technology, all of modern science, all of Western thought. It was the ghost of rationality itself. I told Chris that he found the ghost and that when he found it he thrashed it good. I think in a figurative sense that is true. The things I hope to bring to light as we go along are some of the things he uncovered. Now the times are such that others may at last find them of value. No one then would see the ghost that Phædrus pursued, but I think now that more and more people see it, or get glimpses of it in bad moments, a ghost which calls itself rationality but whose appearance is that of incoherence and meaninglessness, which causes the most normal of everyday acts to seem slightly mad because of their irrelevance to anything else. This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

At Baker, where we stop, the thermometers are reading 108 degrees in the shade. When I take my gloves off, the metal of the gas tank is so hot I can’t touch it. The engine is making ominous knick-knicking sounds from overheating. Very bad. The rear tire has worn badly too, and I feel with my hand that it’s almost as hot as the gas tank.

“We’re going to have to slow down”, I say.

“What?”

“I don’t think we should go over fifty”, I say.

John looks at Sylvia and she looks at him. Something has already been said between them about my slowness. They both look as if they’ve about had it.

“We just want to get there fast”, John says, and they both walk toward a restaurant.

The chain has been running hot and dry too. In the righthand saddlebag I rummage for a can of spray lubricant, find it, then start the engine and spray the moving chain. The chain is still so hot the solvent evaporates almost instantly. Then I squirt a little oil on, let it run for a minute and shut the engine off. Chris waits patiently, then follows me into the restaurant.

“I thought you said the big slump was going to come on the second day”, Sylvia says as we approach the booth they are in.

“Second or third”, I reply.

“Or fourth or fifth?”

“Maybe.”

She and John look at each other again with the same expression they showed before. It seems to say, “Three’s a crowd.” They may want to go ahead fast and wait for me in some town up ahead. I’d suggest it myself except that if they go much faster they won’t be waiting for me in some town. It’ll be by the side of the road.

“I don’t know how the people here stand this”, Sylvia says.

“Well, it’s hard country”, I say with a little irritation. “They know it’s hard before they come here and are ready for it.”

I add, “If one person complains he just makes it that much harder for the others. They’ve got stamina. They know how to keep on going.”

John and Sylvia don’t say much, and John finishes his Coke early and is off to a bar for a snort. I go out and check the cycle luggage again and find that the new pack has been compressing a little and so take up the slack in the ropes and retie them.

Chris points to a thermometer in direct sunlight and we see it has gone all the way above the scale at 120 degrees.

Before we are out of town I am sweating again. The cool drying-off period doesn’t last even half a minute.

The heat just slams into us. Even with dark sunglasses I have to squint my eyes into slits. There’s nothing but burning sand and pale sky so bright it’s hard to look anywhere. It’s just become white-hot everywhere. A real inferno.

John up ahead is speeding faster and faster. I give up on him and slow it down to fifty-five. Unless you’re just looking for trouble in this heat you don’t run tires at eighty-five. A blowout on this stretch would really be it.

I suppose they took what I said as a kind of rebuke but I didn’t have that in mind. I’m no more comfortable than they are in this heat but there’s no point in dwelling on it. All day while I’ve been thinking and talking about Phædrus they must have been thinking about how bad all this is. That’s what’s really wearing them down. The thought.

Some things can be said about Phædrus as an individual:

He was a knower of logic, the classical system-of-the-system which describes the rules and procedures of systematic thought by which analytic knowledge may be structured and interrelated. He was so swift at this his Stanford-Binet IQ, which is essentially a record of skill at analytic manipulation, was recorded at 170, a figure that occurs in only one person in fifty thousand.

He was systematic, but to say he thought and acted like a machine would be to misunderstand the nature of his thought. It was not like pistons and wheels and gears all moving at once, massive and coordinated. The image of a laser beam comes to mind instead; a single pencil of light of such terrific energy in such extreme concentration it can be shot at the moon and its reflection seen back on earth. Phædrus did not try to use his brilliance for general illumination. He sought one specific distant target and aimed for it and hit it. And that was all. General illumination of that target he hit now seems to be left for me.

In proportion to his intelligence he was extremely isolated. There’s no record of his having had close friends. He traveled alone. Always. Even in the presence of others he was completely alone. People sometimes felt this and felt rejected by it, and so did not like him, but their dislike was not important to him.

His wife and family seem to have suffered the most. His wife says those who tried to go beyond the barriers of his reserve found themselves facing a blank. My impression is that they were starved for some kind of affection which he never gave.

No one really knew him. That is evidently the way he wanted it, and that’s the way it was. Perhaps his aloneness was the result of his intelligence. Perhaps it was the cause. But the two were always together. An uncanny solitary intelligence.