Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

For many of the students, this withholding created a Kafkaesque situation in which they saw they were to be punished for failure to do something but no one would tell them what they were supposed to do. They looked within themselves and saw nothing and looked at Phædrus and saw nothing and just sat there helpless, not knowing what to do. The vacuum was deadly. One girl suffered a nervous breakdown. You cannot withhold grades and sit there and create a goalless vacuum. You have to provide some goal for a class to work toward that will fill that vacuum. This he wasn’t doing.

He couldn’t. He could think of no possible way he could tell them what they should work toward without falling back into the trap of authoritarian, didactic teaching. But how can you put on the blackboard the mysterious internal goal of each creative person?

The next quarter he dropped the whole idea and went back to regular grading, discouraged, confused, feeling he was right but somehow it had come out all wrong. When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn’t what he wanted to do.

He’d heard that Reed College in Oregon withheld grades until graduation, and during the summer vacation he went there but was told the faculty was divided on the value of withholding grades and that no one was tremendously happy about the system. During the rest of the summer his mood became depressed and lazy. He and his wife camped a lot in those mountains. She asked why he was so silent all the time but he couldn’t say why. He was just stopped. Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything.

It’s looking bad for Chris. For a while he was way ahead of me and now he sits under a tree and rests. He doesn’t look at me, and that’s how I know it’s bad.

I sit down next to him and his expression is distant. His face is flushed and I can see he’s exhausted. We sit and listen to the wind through the pines.

I know eventually he’ll get up and keep going but he doesn’t know this, and is afraid to face the possibility that his fear creates: that he may not be able to climb the mountain at all. I remember something Phædrus had written about these mountains and tell it to Chris now.

“Years ago”, I tell him, “your mother and I were at the timberline not so far from here and we camped near a lake with a marsh on one side.”

He doesn’t look up but he’s listening.

“At about dawn we heard falling rocks and we thought it must be an animal, except that animals don’t usually clatter around. Then I heard a squishing sound in the marsh and we were really wide-awake. I got out of the sleeping bag slowly and got our revolver from my jacket and crouched by a tree.”

Now Chris’s attention is distracted from his own problems.

“There was another squish”, I say. “I thought it could be horses with dudes packing in, but not at this hour. Another squish! And a loud galoomph! That’s no horse! And a Gallomph! and a GALOOMPH! And there, in the dim grey light of dawn coming straight for me through the muck of the marsh, was the biggest bull moose I ever saw. Horns as wide as a man is tall. Next to the grizzly the most dangerous animal in the mountains. Some say the worst.”

Chris’s eyes are bright again.

“GALOOMPH! I cocked the hammer on the revolver, thinking a thirty-eight Special wasn’t very much for a moose. GALOOMPH! He didn’t SEE me! GALOOMPH! I couldn’t get out of his way. Your mother was in the sleeping bag right in his path. GALOOMPH! What a GIANT! GALOOMPH! He’s ten yards away! GALOOMPH! I stand up and take aim. GALOOMPH! — GALOOMPH! — GALOOMPH! — He stops, THREE YARDS AWAY, and sees me. The gunsights lie right between his eyes. We’re motionless.”

I reach around into my pack and get out some cheese.

“Then what happened?” Chris asks.

“Wait until I cut off some of this cheese.”

I remove my hunting knife and hold the cheese wrapper so that my fingers don’t get on it. I slice out a quarter-inch hunk and hold it out for him.

He takes it. “Then what happened?”

I watch until he takes his first bite. “That bull moose looked at me for what must have been five seconds. Then he looked down at your mother. Then he looked at me again, and at the revolver which was practically lying on top of his big round nose. And then he smiled and slowly walked away.”

“Oh”, says Chris. He looks disappointed.

“Normally when they’re confronted like that they’ll charge”, I say, “but he just thought it was a nice morning, and we were there first, so why make trouble? And that’s why he smiled.”

“Can they smile?”

“No, but it looked that way.”

I put the cheese away and add, “Later on that day we were jumping from boulder to boulder down the side of a slope. I was about to land on a great big brown boulder when all of a sudden the great big brown boulder jumped into the air and ran off into the woods. It was the same moose. I think that moose must have been pretty sick of us that day.”

I help Chris get to his feet. “You were going a little too fast”, I say. “Now the mountainside’s becoming steep and we have to go slowly. If you go too fast you get winded and when you get winded you get dizzy and that weakens your spirit and you think, I can’t do it. So go slow for a while.”

“I’ll stay behind you”, he says.

“Okay.”

We walk now away from the stream we were following, up the canyon side at the shallowest angle I can find.

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.

But of course, without the top you can’t have any sides. It’s the top that defines the sides. So on we go — we have a long way — no hurry — just one step after the next — with a little Chautauqua for entertainment. Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it’s a shame more people don’t switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant but it never is.

There’s a large fragment concerning Phædrus’ first class after he gave that assignment on “What is quality in thought and statement?” The atmosphere was explosive. Almost everyone seemed as frustrated and angered as he had been by the question.

“How are we supposed to know what quality is?” they said. “You’re supposed to tell us!”

Then he told them he couldn’t figure it out either and really wanted to know. He had assigned it in the hope that somebody would come up with a good answer. That ignited it. A roar of indignation shook the room. Before the commotion had settled down another teacher had stuck his head in the door to see what the trouble was.

“It’s all right”, Phædrus said. “We just accidentally stumbled over a genuine question, and the shock is hard to recover from.” Some students looked curious at this, and the noise simmered down.

He then used the occasion for a short return to his theme of “Corruption and Decay in the Church of Reason.” It was a measure of this corruption, he said, that students should be outraged by someone trying to use them to seek the truth. You were supposed to fake this search for the truth, to imitate it. To actually search for it was a damned imposition.