Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“Let’s walk for a while”, I say.

“Where?”

“Toward the school.”

“All right.”

We walk under shady trees on very neat sidewalks past neat houses. The avenues provide many small surprises of recognition. Heavy recall. He’s walked through these streets many times. Lectures. He prepared his lectures in the peripatetic manner, using these streets as his academy.

The subject he’d been brought here to teach was rhetoric, writing, the second of the three R’s. He was to teach some advanced courses in technical writing and some sections of freshman English.

“Do you remember this street?” I ask Chris.

He looks around and says, “We used to ride in the car to look for you.” He points across the street. “I remember that house with the funny roof. Whoever saw you first would get a nickel. And then we’d stop and let you in the back of the car and you wouldn’t even talk to us.”

“I was thinking hard then.”

“That’s what Mom said.”

He was thinking hard. The crushing teaching load was bad enough, but what for him was far worse was that he understood in his precise analytic way that the subject he was teaching was undoubtedly the most unprecise, unanalytic, amorphous area in the entire Church of Reason. That’s why he was thinking so hard. To a methodical, laboratory-trained mind, rhetoric is just completely hopeless. It’s like a huge Sargasso Sea of stagnated logic.

What you’re supposed to do in most freshman-rhetoric courses is to read a little essay or short story, discuss how the writer has done certain little things to achieve certain little effects, and then have the students write an imitative little essay or short story to see if they can do the same little things. He tried this over and over again but it never jelled. The students seldom achieved anything, as a result of this calculated mimicry, that was remotely close to the models he’d given them. More often their writing got worse. It seemed as though every rule he honestly tried to discover with them and learn with them was so full of exceptions and contradictions and qualifications and confusions that he wished he’d never come across the rule in the first place.

A student would always ask how the rule would apply in a certain special circumstance. Phædrus would then have the choice of trying to fake through a made-up explanation of how it worked, or follow the selfless route and say what he really thought. And what he really thought was that the rule was pasted on to the writing after the writing was all done. It was post hoc, after the fact, instead of prior to the fact. And he became convinced that all the writers the students were supposed to mimic wrote without rules, putting down whatever sounded right, then going back to see if it still sounded right and changing it if it didn’t. There were some who apparently wrote with calculating premeditation because that’s the way their product looked. But that seemed to him to be a very poor way to look. It had a certain syrup, as Gertrude Stein once said, but it didn’t pour. But how’re you to teach something that isn’t premeditated? It was a seemingly impossible requirement. He just took the text and commented on it in an unpremeditated way and hoped the students would get something from that. It wasn’t satisfactory.

There it is up ahead. Tension hits, the same stomach feeling, as we walk toward it.

“Do you remember that building?”

“That’s where you used to teach — why are we going here?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to see it.”

Not many people seem to be around. There wouldn’t be, of course. Summer session is on now. Huge and strange gables over old dark-brown brick. A beautiful building, really. The only one that really seems to belong here. Old stone stairway up to the doors. Stairs cupped by wear from millions of footsteps.

“Why are we going inside?”

“Shh. Just don’t say anything now.”

I open the great heavy outside door and enter. Inside are more stairs, worn and wooden. They creak underfoot and smell of a hundred years of sweeping and waxing. Halfway up I stop and listen. There’s no sound at all.

Chris whispers, “Why are we here?”

I just shake my head. I hear a car go by outside.

Chris whispers, “I don’t like it here. It’s scary in here.”

“Go outside then”, I say.

“You come too.”

“Later.”

“No, now.” He looks at me and sees I’m staying. His look is so frightened I’m about to change my mind, but then suddenly his expression breaks and he turns and runs down the stairs and out the door before I can follow him.

The big heavy door closes down below, and I’m all alone here now. I listen for some sound. Of whom? — Of him? — I listen for a long time.

The floorboards have an eerie creek as I move down the corridor and they are accompanied by an eerie thought that it is him. In this place he is the reality and I am the ghost. On one of the classroom doorknobs I see his hand rest for a moment, then slowly turn the knob, then push the door open.

The room inside is waiting, exactly as remembered, as if he were here now. He is here now. He’s aware of everything I see. Everything jumps forth and vibrates with recall.

The long dark-green chalkboards on either side are flaked and in need of repair, just as they were. The chalk, never any chalk except little stubs in the trough, is still here. Beyond the blackboard are the windows and through them are the mountains he watched, meditatively, on days when the students were writing. He would sit by the radiator with a stub of chalk in one hand and stare out the window at the mountains, interrupted, occasionally, by a student who asked, “Do we have to do — ?” And he would turn and answer whatever thing it was and there was a oneness he had never known before. This was a place where he was received… as himself. Not as what he could be or should be but as himself. A place all receptive… listening. He gave everything to it. This wasn’t one room, this was a thousand rooms, changing each day with the storms and snows and patterns of clouds on the mountains, with each class, and even with each student. No two hours were ever alike, and it was always a mystery to him what the next one would bring.

My sense of time has been lost when I hear a creaking of steps in the hall. It becomes louder, then stops at the entrance to this classroom. The knob turns. The door opens. A woman looks in.

She has an aggressive face, as if she intended to catch someone here. She appears to be in her late twenties, is not very pretty. “I thought I saw someone”, she says. “I thought — ” She looks puzzled.

She comes inside the room and walks toward me. She looks at me more closely. Now the aggressive look vanishes, slowly changing to wonder. She looks astonished.

“Oh, my God”, she says. “Is it you?”

I don’t recognize her at all. Nothing.

She calls my name and I nod, Yes, it’s me.

“You’ve come back.”

I shake my head. “Just for these few minutes.”

She continues to look until it becomes embarrassing. Now she becomes aware of this herself, and asks, “May I sit down for a moment?” The timid way she asks this indicates she may have been a student of his.

She sits down on one of the front-row chairs. Her hand, which bears no wedding ring, is trembling. I really am a ghost.

Now she becomes embarrassed herself. “How long are you staying? — No, I asked you that — ”

I fill in, “I’m staying with Bob DeWeese for a few days and then heading West. I had some time to spend in town and thought I’d see how the college looked.”

“Oh”, she says, “I’m glad you did. It’s changed — we’ve all changed — so much since you left.”