Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

He looks around, disoriented. He gets out of the sleeping bag and, while I pack it, gets dressed without really knowing what he does.

“Put your sweater and jacket on”, I say. “It’s going to be a chilly ride.”

He does and gets on and in low gear we follow the logging road down to where it meets the blacktop again. Before we start on it I take one last look back up. Nice. A nice spot. From here the blacktop winds down and down.

Long Chautauqua today. One that I’ve been looking forward to during the whole trip.

Second gear and then third. Not too fast on these curves. Beautiful sunlight on these forests.

There has been a haze, a backup problem in this Chautauqua so far; I talked about caring the first day and then realized I couldn’t say anything meaningful about caring until its inverse side, Quality, is understood. I think it’s important now to tie care to Quality by pointing out that care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristics of Quality.

Thus, if the problem of technological hopelessness is caused by absence of care, both by technologists and antitechnologists; and if care and Quality are external and internal aspects of the same thing, then it follows logically that what really causes technological hopelessness is absence of the perception of Quality in technology by both technologists and antitechnologists. Phædrus’ mad pursuit of the rational, analytic and therefore technological meaning of the word “Quality” was really a pursuit of the answer to the whole problem of technological hopelessness. So it seems to me, anyway.

So I backed up and shifted to the classic-romantic split that I think underlies the whole humanist-technological problem. But that too required a backup into the meaning of Quality.

But to understand the meaning of Quality in classic terms required a backup into metaphysics and its relationship to everyday life. To do that required still another backup into the huge area that relates both metaphysics and everyday life… namely, formal reason. So I proceeded with formal reason up into metaphysics and then into Quality and then from Quality back down into metaphysics and science.

Now we go still further down from science into technology, and I do believe that at last we are where I wanted to be in the first place.

But now we have with us some concepts that greatly alter the whole understanding of things. Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the goal of Art. It remains to work these concepts into a practical, down-to-earth context, and for this there is nothing more practical or down-to-earth than what I have been talking about all along… the repair of an old motorcycle.

This road keeps on winding down through this canyon. Early morning patches of sun are around us everywhere. The cycle hums through the cold air and mountain pines and we pass a small sign that says a breakfast place is a mile ahead.

“Are you hungry?” I shout.

“Yes!” Chris shouts back.

Soon a second sign saying CABINS with an arrow under it points off to the left. We slow down, turn and follow a dirt road until it reaches some varnished log cabins under some trees. We pull the cycle under a tree, shut off the ignition and gas and walk inside the main lodge. The wooden floors have a nice clomp under the cycle boots. We sit down at a tableclothed table and order eggs, hot cakes, maple syrup, milk, sausages and orange juice. That cold wind has worked up an appetite.

“I want to write a letter to Mom”, Chris says.

That sounds good to me. I go to the desk and get some of the lodge stationery. I bring it to Chris and give him my pen. That brisk morning air has given him some energy too. He puts the paper in front of him, grabs the pen in a heavy grip and then concentrates on the blank paper for a while.

He looks up. “What day is it?”

I tell him. He nods and writes it down.

Then I see him write, “Dear Mom:” Then he stares at the paper for a while. Then he looks up. “What should I say?”

I start to grin. I should have him write for an hour about one side of a coin. I’ve sometimes thought of him as a student but not as a rhetoric student.

We’re interrupted by the hot cakes and I tell him to put the letter to one side and I’ll help him afterward.

When we are done I sit smoking with a leaden feeling from the hot cakes and the eggs and everything and notice through the window that under the pines outside the ground is in patches of shadow and sunlight.

Chris brings out the paper again. “Now help me”, he says.

“Okay”, I say. I tell him getting stuck is the commonest trouble of all. Usually, I say, your mind gets stuck when you’re trying to do too many things at once. What you have to do is try not to force words to come. That just gets you more stuck. What you have to do now is separate out the things and do them one at a time. You’re trying to think of what to say and what to say first at the same time and that’s too hard. So separate them out. Just make a list of all the things you want to say in any old order. Then later we’ll figure out the right order.

“Like what things?” he asks.

“Well, what do you want to tell her?”

“About the trip.”

“What things about the trip?”

He thinks for a while. “About the mountain we climbed.”

“Okay, write that down”, I say.

He does. Then I see him write down another item, then another, while I finish my cigarette and coffee. He goes through three sheets of paper, listing things he wants to say.

“Save those”, I tell him, “and we’ll work on them later.”

“I’ll never get all this into one letter”, he says.

He sees me laugh and frowns. I say, “Just pick out the best things.” Then we head outside and onto the motorcycle again.

On the road down the canyon now we feel the steady drop of altitude by a popping of ears. It’s becoming warmer and the air is thicker too. It’s goodbye to the high country, which we’ve been more or less in since Miles City.

Stuckness. That’s what I want to talk about today.

Back on our trip out of Miles City you’ll remember I talked about how formal scientific method could be applied to the repair of a motorcycle through the study of chains of cause and effect and the application of experimental method to determine these chains. The purpose then was to show what was meant by classic rationality.

Now I want to show that that classic pattern of rationality can be tremendously improved, expanded and made far more effective through the formal recognition of Quality in its operation. Before doing this, however, I should go over some of the negative aspects of traditional maintenance to show just where the problems are.

The first is stuckness, a mental stuckness that accompanies the physical stuckness of whatever it is you’re working on. The same thing Chris was suffering from. A screw sticks, for example, on a side cover assembly. You check the manual to see if there might be any special cause for this screw to come off so hard, but all it says is “Remove side cover plate” in that wonderful terse technical style that never tells you what you want to know. There’s no earlier procedure left undone that might cause the cover screws to stick.

If you’re experienced you’d probably apply a penetrating liquid and an impact driver at this point. But suppose you’re inexperienced and you attach a self-locking plier wrench to the shank of your screwdriver and really twist it hard, a procedure you’ve had success with in the past, but which this time succeeds only in tearing the slot of the screw.