Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

People say strange things in their sleep, but why would I tell him I’ll meet him? And why would he think I was awake? There’s something really wrong there that produces a very bad quality feeling, but I don’t know what it is. First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.

I hear Chris move and turn and see him look around.

“Where are we?” he asks.

“Top of the ridge.”

“Oh”, he says. He smiles.

I break open a lunch of Swiss cheese, pepperoni and crackers. I cut up the cheese and then the pepperoni in careful, neat slices. The silence allows you to do each thing right.

“Let’s build a cabin here”, he says.

“Ohhhhh”, I groan, “and climb up to it every day?”

“Sure”, he teases. “That wasn’t hard.”

Yesterday is long ago in his memory. I pass some cheese and crackers over to him.

“What are you always thinking about?” he asks.

“Thousands of things”, I answer.

“What?”

“Most of them wouldn’t make any sense to you.”

“Like what?”

“Like why I told you I’d meet you at the top of the mountain.”

“Oh”, he says, and looks down.

“You said I sounded drunk”, I tell him

“No, not drunk”, he says, still looking down. The way he looks away from me makes me wonder all over again if he’s telling the truth.

“How then?”

He doesn’t answer.

“How then, Chris?”

“Just different.”

“How?”

“Well, I don’t know!” He looks up at me and there’s a flicker of fear. “Like you used to sound a long time ago”, he says, and then looks down.

“When?”

“When we lived here.”

I keep my face composed so that he sees no change of expression in it, then carefully get up and go over and methodically turn the socks on the rock. They’ve dried long ago. As I return with them I see his glance is still on me. Casually I say, “I didn’t know I sounded different.”

He doesn’t reply to this.

I put the socks on and slip the boots over them.

“I’m thirsty”, Chris says.

“We shouldn’t have too far to go down to find water”, I say, standing up. I look at the snow for a while, then say, “You ready to go?”

He nods and we get the packs on.

As we walk along the summit toward the beginning of a ravine we hear another clattering sound of falling rock, much louder than the first one I heard just a while ago. I look up to see where it is. Still nothing.

“What was that?” Chris asks.

“Rockslide.”

We both stand still for a moment, listening. Chris asks, “Is there somebody up there?”

“No, I think it’s just melting snow that’s loosening stones. When it’s really hot like this in the early part of the summer you hear a lot of small rockslides. Sometimes big ones. It’s part of the wearing down of the mountains.”

“I didn’t know mountains wore out.”

“Not wore out, wore down. They get rounded and gentle. These mountains are still unworn.”

Everywhere around us now, except above, the sides of the mountain are covered with blackish green of the forest. In the distance the forest looks like velvet.

I say, “You look at these mountains now, and they look so permanent and peaceful, but they’re changing all the time and the changes aren’t always peaceful. Underneath us, beneath us here right now, there are forces that can tear this whole mountain apart.”

“Do they ever?”

“Ever what?”

“Tear the whole mountain apart?”

“Yes”, I say. Then I remember: “Not far from here there are nineteen people lying dead under millions of tons of rock. Everyone was amazed there were only nineteen.”

“What happened?”

“They were just tourists from the east who had stopped for the night at a campground. During the night the underground forces broke free and when the rescuers saw what had happened the next morning, they just shook their heads. They didn’t even try to excavate. All they could have done was dig down through hundreds of feet of rock for bodies that would just have to be buried all over again. So they left them there. They’re still there now.”

“How did they know there were nineteen?”

“Neighbors and relatives from their hometowns reported them missing.”

Chris stares at the top of the mountain before us. “Didn’t they get any warning?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’d think there’d be a warning.”

“Maybe there was.”

We walk to where the ridge we are on creases inward to the start of a ravine. I see that we can follow this ravine down and eventually find water in it. I start angling down now.

Some more rocks clatter up above. Suddenly I’m frightened.

“Chris”, I say.

“What?”

“You know what I think?”

“No, what?”

“I think we’d be very smart if we let that mountaintop go for now and try it another summer.”

He’s silent. Then he says, “Why?”

“I have bad feelings about it.”

He doesn’t say anything for a long time. Finally he says, “Like what?”

“Oh, I just think that we could get caught up there in a storm or a slide or something and we’d be in real trouble.”

More silence. I look up and see real disappointment in his face. I think he knows I’m leaving something out. “Why don’t you think about it”, I say, “and then when we get to some water and have lunch we’ll decide.”

We continue walking down. “Okay?” I say.

He finally says, “Okay”, in a noncommittal voice.

The descent is easy now but I see it will be steeper soon. It’s still open and sunny here but soon we’ll be in trees again.

I don’t know what to make of all this weird talk at night except that it’s not good. For either of us. It sounds like all the strain of this cycling and camping and Chautauqua and all these old places has a bad effect on me that appears at night. I want to clear out of here as fast as possible.

I don’t suppose that sounds like the old days to Chris either. I spook very easily these days, and am not ashamed to admit it. He never spooked at anything. Never. That’s the difference between us. That’s why I’m alive and he’s not. If he’s up there, some psychic entity, some ghost, some Doppelganger waiting up there for us in God knows what fashion — well, he’s going to have to wait a long time. A very long time.

These damned heights get eerie after a while. I want to go down, way down; far, far down.

To the ocean. That sounds right. Where the waves roll in slowly and there’s always a roar and you can’t fall anywhere. You’re already there.

Now we enter the trees again, and the sight of the mountaintop is obscured by their branches and I’m glad.

I think we’ve gone as far along Phædrus’ path as we want to go in this Chautauqua too. I want to leave his path now. I’ve given him all due credit for what he thought and said and wrote, and now I want to develop on my own some of the ideas he neglected to pursue. The title of this Chautauqua is “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, not “Zen and the Art of Mountain Climbing”, and there are no motorcycles on the tops of mountains, and in my opinion very little Zen. Zen is the “spirit of the valley”, not the mountaintop. The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there. Let’s get out of here.

“Feels good to be going down, doesn’t it?” I say.

No answer.

We’re going to have a little fight, I’m afraid.

You go up the mountaintop and all you’re gonna get is a great big heavy stone tablet handed to you with a bunch of rules on it.

That’s about what happened to him.

Thought he was a goddamned Messiah.