Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Human History Timeline Reason
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Reading Robert Pirsig's description of a road trip today, one feels bereft. In his 1974 autobiographical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he describes an unhurried pace over two-lane roads and through thunderstorms that take the narrator and his companions by surprise every bit they ride through the North Dakota plains. They annals the miles in subtly varying marsh odors and in blackbirds spotted, rather than in coordinates ticked off. Most shocking, there is a child on the back of 1 of the motorcycles. When was the final time you saw that? The travelers' exposure—to bodily hazard, to all the unknowns of the route—is arresting to present-twenty-four hour period readers, specially if they don't ride motorcycles. And this exposure is somehow existential in its significance: Pirsig conveys the experience of being fully in the globe, without the arbitration of devices that filter reality, smoothing its rough edges for our psychic comfort.
If such experiences feel less available to united states now, Pirsig would non be surprised. Already, in 1974, he offered this story as a meditation on a particular way of moving through the earth, one that felt marked for extinction. The book, which uses the narrator'due south road trip with his son and two friends equally a journey of enquiry into values, became a massive best seller, and in the decades since its publication has inspired millions to seek their own accommodation with modern life, governed by neither a reflexive aversion to technology, nor a naive organized religion in information technology. At the heart of the story is the motorcycle itself, a 1966 Honda Super Hawk. Hondas began to sell widely in America in the 1960s, inaugurating an constant fascination with Japanese design amongst American motorists, and the company's founder, Soichiro Honda, raised the thought of "quality" to a quasi-mystical status, congruent with Pirsig'southward own efforts in Zen to articulate a "metaphysics of quality." Pirsig's writing conveys his loyalty to this car, a relationship of care extending over many years. I got to work on several Hondas of this vintage when I ran a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia. Compared to British bikes of the same era, the Hondas seemed more refined. (My writing career grew out of these experiences—an effort to clear the human chemical element in mechanical piece of work.)
In the first chapter, a disagreement develops between the narrator and his riding companions, John and Sylvia, over the question of motorcycle maintenance. Robert performs his own maintenance, while John and Sylvia insist on having a professional do it. This posture of non-interest, we soon larn, is a crucial element of their countercultural sensibility. They seek escape from "the whole organized scrap" or "the system," as the couple puts it; technology is a death force, and the betoken of hitting the route is to leave information technology behind. The solution, or rather evasion, that John and Sylvia hit on for managing their revulsion at engineering is to "Have information technology somewhere else. Don't have it here." The irony is they still discover themselves entangled with The Machine—the one they sit down on.
Zen and the Fine art of Motorcycle Maintenance
A narration of a summertime motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son, the volume becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions of how to live. The narrator's relationship with his son leads to a powerful self-reckoning; the arts and crafts of motorcycle maintenance leads to an austerely beautiful procedure for reconciling science, religion, and humanism
Today, we often use "applied science" to refer to systems whose inner workings are assiduously kept out of view, magical devices that offering no apparent friction between the self and the globe, no need to chief the grubby details of their functioning. The industry of our smartphones, the algorithms that guide our digital experiences from the cloud—it all takes place "somewhere else," just every bit John and Sylvia wished.
Notwithstanding lately we have begun to realize that this very opacity has opened new avenues of surveillance and manipulation. Big Tech now orders everyday life more deeply than John and Sylvia imagined in their techno-dystopian nightmare. Today, a road trip to "go away from it all" would depend on GPS, and would prompt digital ads tailored to our destination. The whole excursion would exist mined for behavioral data and used to nudge us into profitable channels, likely without our even knowing it.
We don't know what Pirsig, who died in 2017, thought of these developments, as he refrained from well-nigh interviews after publishing a second novel, Lila, in 1991. But his narrator has left us a mode out that can be reclaimed past anyone venturesome enough to try it: He patiently attends to his own motorcycle, submits to its quirky mechanical needs and learns to sympathize it. His manner of living with machines doesn't rely on the seductions of effortless convenience; it requires us to become our hands dirty, to exist self-reliant. In Zen, we see a man maintaining directly engagement with the world of material objects, and with information technology some measure out of independence—both from the purveyors of magic and from cultural despair.
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Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/robert-pirsig-zen-art-motorcycle-maintenance-resonates-today-180975768/