Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I wake up wondering if we’re near mountains because of memory or because of something in the air. We’re in a beautiful old wooden room of a hotel. The sun is shining on the dark wood through the window shade, but even with the shade drawn I can sense that we’re near mountains. There’s mountain air in this room. It’s cool and moist and almost fragrant. One deep breath makes me ready for the next one and then the next one and with each deep breath I feel a little readier until I jump out of bed and pull up the shade and let all that sunlight in… brilliant, cool, bright, sharp and clear.

An urge grows to go over and push Chris up and down to bounce him awake to see all this, but out of kindness, or respect maybe, he is allowed to sleep a while longer, and so with razor and soap I go to a common washroom at the other end of a long corridor of the same dark wood, floorboards creaking all the way. In the washroom the hot water is steaming and perking in the pipes, too hot at first for shaving, but fine after I mix it with cold water.

Through the window beyond the mirror I see there is a porch out in back, and when done go out and stand on it. It’s at a level with the tops of the trees surrounding the hotel which seem to respond to this morning air the same way I do. The branches and leaves move with each light breeze as if it were expected, were what had been waited for all this time.

Chris is soon up and Sylvia comes out of her room saying she and John have already eaten breakfast and he is out walking somewhere, but she will go with Chris and me and walk down with us to breakfast

We are in love with everything this morning and talk about good things all the way down a sunlit morning street to a restaurant. The eggs and hot cakes and coffee are from heaven. Sylvia and Chris talk intimately about his school and friends and personal things, while I listen and gaze through the large restaurant window at the storefront across the road. So different now from that lonely night in South Dakota. Beyond those buildings are mountains and snowfields.

Sylvia says John has talked to someone in town about another route to Bozeman, south through Yellowstone Park.

“South?” I say. “You mean Red Lodge?”

“I guess so.”

A memory comes to me of snowfields in June. “That road goes way up above the timberline.”

“Is that bad?” Sylvia asks.

“It’ll be cold.” In the middle of the snowfields in my mind appear the cycles and us riding on them. “But just tremendous.”

We meet John again and it’s settled. Soon, beyond a railroad underpass, we are on a twisting blacktop through fields toward the mountains up ahead. This is a road Phædrus used all the time, and flashes of his memory coincide everywhere. The high, dark Absaroka Range looms directly ahead.

We are following a creek to its source. It contains water that was probably snow less than an hour ago. The stream and the road pass through green and stony fields each a little higher than before. Everything is so intense in this sunlight. Dark shadows, bright light. Dark blue sky. The sun is bright and hot when we’re in it, but when we pass under trees along the road, it’s suddenly cold.

We play tag with a little blue Porsche along the way, passing it with a beep and being passed by it with a beep and doing this several times through fields of dark aspen and bright greens of grass and mountain shrubs. All this is remembered.

He would use this route to get into the high country, then backpack in from the road for three or four or five days, then come back out for more food and head back in again, needing these mountains in an almost physiological way. The train of his abstractions became so long and so involved he had to have the surroundings of silence and space here to hold it straight. It was as though hours of constructions would have been shattered by the least distraction of other thought or other duty. It wasn’t like other people’s thinking, even then, before his insanity. It was at a level at which everything shifts and changes, at which institutional values and verities are gone and there is nothing but one’s own spirit to keep one going. His early failure had released him from any felt obligation to think along institutional lines and his thoughts were already independent to a degree few people are familiar with. He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time. He didn’t see these things and think this way at first, however, only later on. I’m getting way out of sequence here. This all came much later.

At first the truths Phædrus began to pursue were lateral truths; no longer the frontal truths of science, those toward which the discipline pointed, but the kind of truth you see laterally, out of the corner of your eye. In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can’t make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally. That’s a word he later used to describe a growth of knowledge that doesn’t move forward like an arrow in flight, but expands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull’s eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window. Lateral knowledge is knowledge that’s from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that’s not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one’s existing system of getting at truth.

To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting. Drifting is what one does when looking at lateral truth. He couldn’t follow any known method of procedure to uncover its cause because it was these methods and procedures that were all screwed up in the first place. So he drifted. That was all he could do.

The drift took him into the Army, which sent him to Korea. From his memory there’s a fragment, a picture of a wall, seen from a prow of a ship, shining radiantly, like a gate of heaven, across a misty harbor. He must have valued the fragment greatly and thought about it many times because although it doesn’t fit anything else it is intense, so intense I’ve returned to it myself many times. It seems to symbolize something very important, a turning point.

His letters from Korea are radically different from his earlier writing, indicating this same turning point. They just explode with emotion. He writes page after page about tiny details of things he sees: marketplaces, shops with sliding glass doors, slate roofs, roads, thatched huts, everything. Sometimes full of wild enthusiasm, sometimes depressed, sometimes angry, sometimes even humorous, he is like someone or some creature that has found an exit from a cage he did not even know was around him, and is wildly roaming over the countryside visually devouring everything in sight.

Later he made friends with Korean laborers who spoke some English but wanted to learn more so that they could qualify as translators. He spent time with them after working hours and in return they took him on long weekend hikes through the hills to see their homes and friends and translate for him the way of life and thought of another culture.

He is sitting by a footpath on a beautiful windswept hillside overlooking the Yellow Sea. The rice in the terrace below the footpath is full-grown and brown. His friends look down at the sea with him seeing islands far out from shore. They eat a picnic lunch and talk to one another and to him and the subject is ideographs and their relation to the world. He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His friends nod and smile and eat the food they’ve taken from tins and say no pleasantly. He is confused by the nod yes and the answer no and so repeats the statement. Again comes the nod meaning yes and the answer no. That is the end of the fragment, but like the wall it’s one he thinks about many times.