Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

While at work I was thinking about this same lack of care in the digital computer manuals I was editing. Writing and editing technical manuals is what I do for a living the other eleven months of the year and I knew they were full of errors, ambiguities, omissions and information so completely screwed up you had to read them six times to make any sense out of them. But what struck me for the first time was the agreement of these manuals with the spectator attitude I had seen in the shop. These were spectator manuals. It was built into the format of them. Implicit in every line is the idea that “Here is the machine, isolated in time and in space from everything else in the universe. It has no relationship to you, you have no relationship to it, other than to turn certain switches, maintain voltage levels, check for error conditions — ” and so on. That’s it. The mechanics in their attitude toward the machine were really taking no different attitude from the manual’s toward the machine, or from the attitude I had when I brought it in there. We were all spectators. And it occurred to me there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

On this trip I think we should notice it, explore it a little, to see if in that strange separation of what man is from what man does we may have some clues as to what the hell has gone wrong in this twentieth century. I don’t want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else.

I suddenly notice the land here has flattened into a Euclidian plane. Not a hill, not a bump anywhere. This means we have entered the Red River Valley. We will soon be into the Dakotas.

By the time we are out of the Red River Valley the storm clouds are everywhere and almost upon us.

John and I have discussed the situation in Breckenridge and decided to keep going until we have to stop.

That shouldn’t be long now. The sun is gone, the wind is blowing cold, and a wall of differing shades of grey looms around us.

It seems huge, overpowering. The prairie here is huge but above it the hugeness of this ominous grey mass ready to descend is frightening. We are traveling at its mercy now. When and where it will come is nothing we can control. All we can do is watch it move in closer and closer.

Where the darkest grey has come down to the ground, a town that was seen earlier, some small buildings and a water tower, has disappeared. It will be on us soon now. I don’t see any towns ahead and we are just going to have to run for it.

I pull up alongside John and throw my hand ahead in a “Speed up!” gesture. He nods and opens up. I let him get ahead a little, then pick up to his speed. The engine responds beautifully… seventy — eighty — eighty-five — we are really feeling the wind now and I drop my head to cut down the resistance — ninety. The speedometer needle swings back and forth but the tach reads a steady nine thousand — about ninety-five miles an hour — and we hold this speed — moving. Too fast to focus on the shoulder of the road now — I reach forward and flip the headlight switch just for safety. But it is needed anyway. It is getting very dark.

We whizz through the flat open land, not a car anywhere, hardly a tree, but the road is smooth and clean and the engine now has a “packed”, high rpm sound that says it’s right on. It gets darker and darker.

A flash and Ka-wham! of thunder, one right on top of the other. That shook me, and Chris has got his head against my back now. A few warning drops of rain — at this speed they are like needles. A second flash… WHAM and everything brilliant — and then in the brilliance of the next flash that farmhouse — that windmill — oh, my God, he’s been here! — throttle off — this is his road — a fence and trees — and the speed drops to seventy, then sixty, then fifty-five and I hold it there.

“Why are we slowing down?” Chris shouts.

“Too fast!”

“No, it isn’t!”

I nod yes.

The house and water tower have gone by and then a small drainage ditch appears and a crossroad leading off to the horizon. Yes — that’s right, I think. That’s exactly right.

“They’re way ahead of us!” Chris hollers. “Speed up!”

I turn my head from side to side.

“Why not?” he hollers.

“Not safe!”

“They’re gone!”

“They’ll wait.”

“Speed up!”

“No.” I shake my head. It’s just a feeling. On a cycle you trust them and we stay at fifty-five.

The first rain begins now but up ahead I see the lights of a town — I knew it would be there.

When we arrive John and Sylvia are there under the first tree by the road, waiting for us.

“What happened to you?”

“Slowed down.”

“Well, we know that. Something wrong?”

“No. Let’s get out of this rain.”

John says there is a motel at the other end of town, but I tell him there’s a better one if you turn right, at a row of cottonwoods a few blocks down.

We turn at the cottonwoods and travel a few blocks, and a small motel appears. Inside the office John looks around and says, “This is a good place. When were you here before?”

“I don’t remember”, I say.

“Then how did you know about this?”

“Intuition.”

He looks at Sylvia and shakes his head.

Sylvia has been watching me silently for some time. She notices my hands are unsteady as I sign in. “You look awfully pale”, she says. “Did that lightning shake you up?”

“No.”

“You look like you’d seen a ghost.”

John and Chris look at me and I turn away from them to the door. It is still raining hard, but we make a run for it to the rooms. The gear on the cycles is protected and we wait until the storm passes over before removing it.

After the rain stops, the sky lightens a little. But from the motel courtyard, I see past the cottonwoods that a second darkness, that of night, is about to come on. We walk into town, have supper, and by the time we get back, the fatigue of the day is really on me. We rest, almost motionless, in the metal armchairs of the motel courtyard, slowly working down a pint of whiskey that John brought with some mix from the motel cooler. It goes down slowly and agreeably. A cool night wind rattles the leaves of the cottonwoods along the road.

Chris wonders what we should do next. Nothing tires this kid. The newness and strangeness of the motel surroundings excite him and he wants us to sing songs as they did at camp.

“We’re not very good at songs”, John says.

“Let’s tell stories then”, Chris says. He thinks for a while. “Do you know any good ghost stories? All the kids in our cabin used to tell ghost stories at night.”

“You tell us some”, John says.

And he does. They are kind of fun to hear. Some of them I haven’t heard since I was his age. I tell him so, and Chris wants to hear some of mine, but I can’t remember any.

After a while he says, “Do you believe in ghosts?”

“No”, I say

“Why not?”

“Because they are un-sci-en-ti-fic.”

The way I say this makes John smile. “They contain no matter”, I continue, “and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people’s minds.”

The whiskey, the fatigue and the wind in the trees start mixing in my mind. “Of course”, I add, “the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people’s minds. It’s best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you’re safe. That doesn’t leave you very much to believe in, but that’s scientific too.”