Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

It won’t happen again. —

I think what I’ll do is head down for San Francisco, and put Chris on a bus for home, and then sell the cycle and check in at a hospital — or that last seems so pointless — I don’t know what I’ll do.

The trip won’t have been entirely wasted. At least he’ll have some good memories of me as he grows up. That takes away some of the anxiety a little. That’s a good thought to hold on to. I’ll hold on to that.

Meanwhile, just continue on a normal trip and hope something improves. Don’t throw anything away. Never, never throw anything away.

Cold out! Feels like winter! Where are we, that it should get this cold? We must be at a high altitude. I look out of the sleeping bag and this time see frost on the motorcycle. On the chrome of the gas tank it’s sparkling in the early sunlight. On the black frame where the sunlight hits it it’s partly turned to beads of water that will soon run down to the wheel. It’s too cold to lie around.

I remember the dust under the pine needles and put my boots on carefully to avoid stirring it up. At the motorcycle I unpack everything, get out the long underwear and put it on, then clothes, then sweater, then jacket. I’m still cold.

I step through the spongy dust onto the dirt road that has brought us here and sprint down it through the pines for a hundred feet or so, then settle down to an even run and then finally stop. That feels better. Not a sound. The frost is in little patches on the road too, but melting and dark wet tan between the patches where the early sun’s rays strike it. It’s so white and lacy and untouched. It’s on the trees too. I walk back softly down the road as if not to disturb the sunrise. Early autumn feeling.

Chris is still asleep and we won’t be able to go anywhere until the air warms up. Good time to get the cycle tuned. I work loose the knob on the side cover over the air filter, and underneath the filter withdraw a worn and dirty roll of field tools. My hands are stiff with the cold and the backs of them are wrinkled. Those wrinkles aren’t from the cold though. At forty that’s old age coming on. I lay the roll on the seat and spread it open… there they are — like seeing old friends again.

I hear Chris, glance over the seat and see that he’s stirring but doesn’t get up. He’s evidently just rolling in his sleep. After a while the sun gets warmer and my hands aren’t as stiff as they were.

I was going to talk about some of the lore of cycle repair, the hundreds of things you learn as you go along, which enrich what you’re doing not only practically but esthetically. But that seems too trivial now, though I shouldn’t say that.

But now I want to shift into another direction, which completes his story. I never really completed it because I didn’t think it would be necessary. But now I think it would be a good time to do that in what time remains.

The metal of these wrenches is so cold it hurts the hands. But it’s a good hurt. It’s real, not imaginary, and it’s here, absolutely, in my hand.

– When you travel a path and note that another path breaks away to one side at, say, a 30-degree angle, and then later another path branches away to the same side at a broader angle, say 45 degrees, and another path later at 90 degrees, you begin to understand that there’s some point over there that all the paths lead to and that a lot of people have found it worthwhile to go that way, and you begin to wonder out of curiosity if perhaps that isn’t the way you should go too.

In his pursuit of a concept of Quality, Phædrus kept seeing again and again little paths all leading toward some point off to one side. He thought he already knew about the general area they led to, ancient Greece, but now he wondered if he had overlooked something there.

He had asked Sarah, who long before had come by with her watering pot and put the idea of Quality in his head, where in English literature quality, as a subject, was taught.

“Good heavens, I don’t know, I’m not an English scholar”, she had said. “I’m a classics scholar. My field is Greek.”

“Is quality a part of Greek thought?” he had asked.

“Quality is every part of Greek thought”, she had said, and he had thought about this. Sometimes under her old-ladyish way of speaking he thought he detected a secret canniness, as though like a Delphic oracle she said things with hidden meanings, but he could never be sure.

Ancient Greece. Strange that for them Quality should be everything while today it sounds odd to even say quality is real. What unseen changes could have taken place?

A second path to ancient Greece was indicated by the sudden way the whole question, What is quality?, had been jolted into systematic philosophy. He had thought he was done with that field. But “quality” had opened it all up again.

Systematic philosophy is Greek. The ancient Greeks invented it and, in so doing, put their permanent stamp on it. Whitehead’s statement that all philosophy is nothing but “footnotes to Plato” can be well supported. The confusion about the reality of Quality had to start back there sometime.

A third path appeared when he decided to move on from Bozeman toward the Ph.D. degree he needed to continue University teaching. He wanted to pursue the enquiry into the meaning of Quality that his English teaching had started. But where? And in which discipline?

It was apparent that the term “Quality” was not within any one discipline unless that discipline was philosophy. And he knew from his experience with philosophy that further study there was unlikely to uncover anything concerning an apparently mystic term in English composition.

He became more and more aware of the possibility that there was no program available where he might study Quality in terms resembling those in which he understood it. Quality lay not only outside any academic discipline, it lay outside the grasp of the methods of the entire Church of Reason. It would take quite a University to accept a doctoral thesis in which the candidate refused to define his central term.

He looked through the catalogs for a long time before he discovered what he hoped he was looking for. There was one University, the University of Chicago, where there existed an interdisciplinary program in “Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods.” The examining committee included a professor of English, a professor of philosophy, a professor of Chinese, and the Chairman, who was a professor of ancient Greek! That one rang bells.

On the machine now everything is done except the oil change. I wake Chris and we pack and go. He’s still sleepy but the cold air on the road wakes him up.

The piney road goes upward, and there’s not so much traffic this morning. The rocks among the pines are dark and volcanic. I wonder if that was volcanic dust we slept in. Is there such a thing as volcanic dust? Chris says he’s hungry and I am too.

At La Pine we stop. I tell Chris to order me ham and eggs for breakfast while I stay outside to change the oil.

At a filling station next to the restaurant I pick up a quart of oil, and in a gravelly lot back of the restaurant remove the drain plug, let the oil drain, replace the plug, add the new oil, and when I’m done the new oil on the dipstick shines in the sunlight almost as clear and colorless as water. Ahhhhh!

I repack the wrench, enter the restaurant and see Chris and, on the table, my breakfast. I head into the washroom, clean up and return.

“Am I hungry!” he says.

“It was a cold night”, I say. “We burned up a lot of food just staying alive.”

The eggs are good. The ham too. Chris talks about the dream and how it frightened him and then that’s done with. He looks as though he’s about to ask a question, then doesn’t, then stares out the window into the pines for a while, then comes back with it.