Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Later I hear him prowl at the knapsack. I roll over and see him glaring at me. “Where’s the cheese?” he says. The tone’s still belligerent.

But I’m not going to give in to it. “Help yourself”, I say. “I’m not waiting on you.”

He digs around and finds some cheese and crackers. I give him my hunting knife to spread the cheese with. “I think what I’m going to do, Chris, is put all the heavy stuff in my pack and the light stuff in yours. That way I won’t have to go back and forth with both packs.”

He agrees to this and his mood improves. It seems to have solved something for him.

My pack must be about forty or forty-five pounds now, and after we’ve climbed for a while an equilibrium establishes itself at about one breath for each step.

We come to a rough grade and it changes to two breaths per step. At one bank it goes to four breaths per step. Huge steps, almost vertical, hanging on to roots and branches. I feel stupid because I should have planned my way around this. The aspen staves come in handy now, and Chris takes some interest in the use of his. The packs made you top heavy and the sticks are good insurance against toppling over. You plant one foot, plant the staff, then SWING on it, up, and take three breaths, then plant the next foot, plant the staff and SWING up.

I don’t know if I’ve got any more Chautauqua left in me today. My head gets fuzzy about this time in the afternoon — maybe I can establish just one overview and let it go for today.

Way back long ago when we first set out on this strange voyage I talked about how John and Sylvia seemed to be running from some mysterious death force that seemed to them to be embodied in technology, and that there were many others like them. I talked for a while about how some of the people involved in technology seemed to be avoiding it too. An underlying reason for this trouble was that they saw it from a kind of “groovy dimension” that was concerned with the immediate surface of things whereas I was concerned with the underlying form. I called John’s style romantic, mine classic. His was, in the argot of the sixties, “hip”, mine was “square.” Then we started going into this square world to see what made it tick. Data, classifications, hierarchies, cause-and-effect and analysis were discussed, and somewhere along there was some talk about a handful of sand, the world of which we’re conscious, taken from the endless landscape of awareness around us. I said a process of discrimination goes to work on this handful of sand and divides it into parts. Classical, square understanding is concerned with the piles of sand and the nature of the grains and the basis for sorting and interrelating them.

Phædrus’ refusal to define Quality, in terms of this analogy, was an attempt to break the grip of the classical sandsifting mode of understanding and find a point of common understanding between the classic and romantic worlds. Quality, the cleavage term between hip and square, seemed to be it. Both worlds used the term. Both knew what it was. It was just that the romantic left it alone and appreciated it for what it was and the classic tried to turn it into a set of intellectual building blocks for other purposes. Now, with the definition blocked, the classic mind was forced to view Quality as the romantic did, undistorted by thought structures.

I’m making a big thing out of all this, these classical-romantic differences, but Phædrus didn’t.

He wasn’t really interested in any kind of fusion of differences between these two worlds. He was after something else… his ghost. In the pursuit of this ghost he went on to wider meanings of Quality which drew him further and further to his end. I differ from him in that I’ve no intention of going on to that end. He just passed through this territory and opened it up. I intend to stay and cultivate it and see if I can get something to grow.

I think that the referent of a term that can split a world into hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic, is an entity that can unite a world already split along these lines into one. A real understanding of Quality doesn’t just serve the System, or even beat it or even escape it. A real understanding of Quality captures the System, tames it, and puts it to work for one’s own personal use, while leaving one completely free to fulfill his inner destiny.

Now that we’re up high on one side of the canyon we can see back and down and across to the other side. It’s as steep there as it is here… a dark mat of greenish-black pines going up to a high ridge. We can measure our progress by sighting against it at what seems like a horizontal angle.

That’s all the Quality talk for today, I guess, thank goodness. I don’t mind the Quality, it’s just that all the classical talk about it isn’t Quality. Quality is just the focal point around which a lot of intellectual furniture is getting rearranged.

We stop for a break and look down below. Chris’s spirits seem to be better now, but I’m afraid it’s the ego thing again.

“Look how far we’ve come”, he says.

“We’ve got a lot farther to go.”

Later on Chris shouts to hear his echo, and throws rocks down to see where they fall. He’s starting to get almost cocky, so I step up the equilibrium to where I breathe at a good swift rate, about one-and-a-half times our former speed. This sobers him somewhat and we keep on climbing.

By about three in the afternoon my legs start to get rubbery and it’s time to stop. I’m not in very good shape. If you go on after that rubbery feeling you start to pull muscles and the next day is agony.

We come to a flat spot, a large knoll protruding from the side of the mountain. I tell Chris this is it for today. He seems satisfied and cheerful; maybe some progress has been made with him after all.

I’m ready for a nap, but clouds have formed in the canyon that appear ready to drop rain. They’ve filled in the canyon so that we can’t see the bottom and can just barely see the ridge on the other side.

I break open the packs and get the tent halves out, Army ponchos, and snap them together. I take a rope and tie it between the two trees, then throw the shelter halves over it. I cut some stakes out of shrubs with the machete, and pound them in, then dig a small trench with the flat end of the machete around the tent to drain away any rainwater. We’ve just got everything inside when the first rain comes down.

Chris is in high spirits about the rain. We lie on our backs on the sleeping bags and watch the rain come down and hear its popping sound on the tent. The forest has a misty appearance and we both become contemplative and watch the leaves of the shrubs jolt when struck by raindrops and jolt a little ourselves when a clash of thunder comes down but feel happy that we’re dry when everything around us is wet.

After a while I reach into my pack for the paperback by Thoreau, find it and have to strain a little to read it to Chris in the grey rainy light. I guess I’ve explained that we’ve done this with other books in the past, advanced books that he wouldn’t normally understand. What happens is I read a sentence, he comes up with a long series of questions about it and then, when he’s satisfied, I read the next sentence.

We do this with Thoreau for a while, but after half an hour I see to my surprise and disappointment that Thoreau isn’t coming through. Chris is restless and so am I. The language structure is wrong for the mountain forest we’re in. At least that’s my feeling. The book seems tame and cloistered, something I’d never have thought of Thoreau, but there it is. He’s talking to another situation, another time, just discovering the evils of technology rather than discovering the solution. He isn’t talking to us. Reluctantly I put the book away again and we’re both silent and meditative. It’s just Chris and me and the forest and the rain. No books can guide us anymore.