From the Bookshelf of Paths to Wholeness…

[close] Sitting in front of me on my desk right now is the copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I bought in August, 1974, and carried with me on my own motorcycle trip from Buffalo, out to Indiana, down to Baltimore, and finally up to New York City, where I stayed for 6 years. I was a year out of college, still trying to figure out what to do when I "grew up," and Pirsig's book came out shortly before I started my own trip. Though at the time it seemed clichéd to take such a book on a motorcycle trip, and it was one more heavy thing to add to the already overstuffed pack strapped behind me on my little Yamaha 200, it turned out to be exactly the right thing to guide my inner journey, and even helped me diagnose and repair a motorcycle issue that led to my seizing a piston in Ohio.

It's been 42 years since I read this book, and when I flip through it and see the sentences I underlined I'm sometimes puzzled by those choices, but it still leaves a feeling in my chest that is an almost indescribable sense of longing, wonder, excitement, and calm. And I can't say many other books have had as lingering an effect, so this one makes the "Books that have inspired me" list.