Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

All around me it’s damp and wet and foggy and cold, but clear enough to see that the motel we have stopped in is on a slope with apple trees down below and grass and small weeds under them covered with dew or just rain that hasn’t run off. I see another slug and then another… my God, the place is crawling with them.

When Chris comes out I show one to him. It moves slowly like a snail across a leaf. He has no comment.

We leave and breakfast in a town off the road called Weott, where I see he’s still in a distant mood. It’s a kind of looking-away mood and a not-talking mood, and I leave him alone.

Farther on at Leggett we see a tourist duck pond and we buy Cracker Jacks and throw them to the ducks and he does this in the most unhappy way I have ever seen. Then we pass into some of the twisting coastal range road and suddenly enter heavy fog. Then the temperature drops and I know we’re back at the ocean again.

When the fog lifts we can see the ocean from a high cliff, far out and so blue and so distant. As we ride I become colder, deep cold.

We stop and I get out the jacket and put it on. I see Chris go very close to the edge of the cliff. It’s at least one hundred feet to the rocks below. Way too close!

“CHRIS!” I holler. He doesn’t answer.

I go up, swiftly grab his shirt and pull him back. “Don’t do that”, I say.

He looks at me with a strange squint.

I get out extra clothes for him and hand them to him. He takes them but he dawdles and doesn’t put them on.

There’s no sense hurrying him. In this mood if he wants to wait, he can.

He waits and waits. Ten minutes, then fifteen minutes pass.

We’re going to have a waiting contest.

After thirty minutes of cold winds off the ocean he asks, “Which way are we going?”

“South, now, along the coast.”

“Let’s go back.”

“Where?”

“To where it’s warmer.”

That would add another hundred miles. “We have to go south now”, I say.

“Why?”

“Because it would add too many miles going back.”

“Let’s go back.”

“No. Get your warm clothes on.”

He doesn’t and just sits there on the ground.

After another fifteen minutes he says, “Let’s go back.”

“Chris, you’re not running the cycle. I’m running it. We’re going south.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s too far and because I’ve said so.”

“Well, why don’t we just go back?”

Anger reaches me. “You don’t really want to know, do you?”

“I want to go back. Just tell me why we can’t go back.”

I’m hanging on to my temper now. “What you really want isn’t to go back. What you really want is just to get me angry, Chris. If you keep it up you’ll succeed!”

Flash of fear. That’s what he wanted. He wants to hate me. Because I’m not him.

He looks down at the ground bitterly, and puts his warm clothes on. Then we’re back on the machine and moving down the coast again.

I can imitate the father he’s supposed to have, but subconsciously, at the Quality level, he sees through it and knows his real father isn’t here. In all this Chautauqua talk there’s been more than a touch of hypocrisy. Advice is given again and again to eliminate subject-object duality, when the biggest duality of all, the duality between me and him, remains unfaced. A mind divided against itself.

But who did it? I didn’t do it. And there’s no way now of undoing it. — I keep wondering how far it is to the bottom of that ocean out there. —

What I am is a heretic who’s recanted, and thereby in everyone’s eyes saved his soul. Everyone’s eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.

I survive mainly by pleasing others. You do that to get out. To get out you figure out what they want you to say and then you say it with as much skill and originality as possible and then, if they’re convinced, you get out. If I hadn’t turned on him I’d still be there, but he was true to what he believed right to the end. That’s the difference between us, and Chris knows it. And that’s the reason why sometimes I feel he’s the reality and I’m the ghost.

We’re on the Mendocino County coast now, and it’s all wild and beautiful and open here. The hills are mostly but in the lee of rocks and folds in the hills are strange flowing shrubs sculptured by the upsweep of winds from the ocean. We pass some old wooden fences, weathered grey. In the distance is an old weathered and grey farmhouse. How could anyone farm here? The fence is broken in many places. Poor.

Where the road drops down from the high cliffs to the beach we stop to rest. When I turn the engine off Chris says, “What are we stopping here for?”

“I’m tired.”

“Well, I’m not. Let’s keep going.”

He’s angry still. I’m angry too.

“Just go over on the beach there and run around in circles until I’m done resting”, I say.

“Let’s keep going”, he says, but I walk away and ignore it. He sits on the curb by the motorcycle.

The ocean smell of rotting organic matter is heavy here and the cold wind doesn’t allow much rest. But I find a large cluster of grey rocks where the wind is still and the heat of the sun can still be felt and enjoyed. I concentrate on the warmth of the sunlight and am grateful for what little there is.

We ride again and what comes to me now is the realization that he’s another Phædrus, thinking the way he used to and acting the same way he used to, looking for trouble, being driven by forces he’s only dimly aware of and doesn’t understand. The questions — the same questions — he’s got to know everything.

And if he doesn’t get the answer he just drives and drives until he gets one and that leads to another question and he drives and drives for the answer to that — endlessly pursuing questions, never seeing, never understanding that the questions will never end. Something is missing and he knows it and will kill himself trying to find it.

We round a sharp turn up an overhanging cliff. The ocean stretches forever, cold and blue out there, and produces a strange sense of despair. Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland people… what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest levels of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean and the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be so stopped by a mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all.

A long time later we come to a town where a luminous haze which has seemed so natural over the ocean is now seen in the streets of the town, giving them a certain aura, a hazy sunny radiance that makes everything look nostalgic, as if remembered from years before.

We stop in a crowded restaurant and find the last remaining empty table by a window overlooking the radiant street. Chris looks down and doesn’t talk. Maybe, in some way, he senses that we haven’t much farther to go.

“I’m not hungry”, he says.

“You don’t mind waiting while I eat?”

“Let’s keep going. I’m not hungry.”

“Well, I am.”

“Well, I’m not. My stomach hurts.” The old symptom.

I eat my lunch amid the conversation and clink of plates and spoons from the other tables and out the window watch a bicycle and rider go by. I feel like somehow we have arrived at the end of the world.

I look up and see Chris is crying.

“Now what?” I say.

“My stomach. It’s hurting.”

“Is that all?”

“No. I just hate everything — I’m sorry I came — I hate this trip — I thought this was going to be fun, and it isn’t any fun — I’m sorry I came.” He is a truth-teller, like Phædrus. And like Phædrus he looks at me now with more and more hatred. The time has come.