Book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig.

I just finished reading this book for probably the 20th time or so... I've been reading the book every year since I first encountered it at the age of 16. I may have missed a few years - although in recent years, I have found even more and more of value here. That's a marvelous experience to have with a book. This book meant the world to me when I discovered the book as a teenager - and now it means even more to me as a very middle-aged adult. How many books work like that, eh? But this book is exceptional in every way.

With a book that has become this much a part of my own being and how I see the world, it's hard to even know what to say - so I'll just choose a quote here that expresses a nice good chunk of the books's meaning, and shows the wonderfully refreshing way in which Pirsig is able to tackle the big questions:

The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, it’s just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either. Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.

Ghosts, you can say - or Maya, illusion. Although I like the idea of ghosts. It's a word that still carries a punch, for all that most people might say they don't believe in ghosts. Even though, of course, as Pirsig points out here, we DO believe in ghosts. All of us do.

I poked around online to find a cover of the edition of Zen that is more or less the same as the cover of the first copy I owned and read, back in the summer of 1980. I've owned and given away so many copies of this book over the years that I've lost track. Another true sign of a good book! :-)