Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

by Robert M. Pirsig

The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.

I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much.

“Dad?” “This had better be the last question, Chris, or I’m going to become angry.” “I was just going to say you sure don’t talk like anyone else.” “Yes, Chris, I know that,” I say. “It’s a problem. Now go to sleep.” “Good night, Dad.”

People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.

The reason you teach and you teach and you teach is that this is a very clever way of running a college on the cheap while giving a false appearance of genuine education.

You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

“Sometime look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you’ll see the difference. The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of instruction. He’s making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he’ll be absorbed and attentive to what he’s doing even though he doesn’t deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn’t following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind’s at rest at the same time the material’s right.”

“Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.” Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana.

As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin.

Schools teach you to imitate.

Originality on the other hand could get you anything—from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

“What should I be when I grow up?” The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don’t know what to say. “Honest,” I finally say. “I mean what kind of a job?” “Any kind.” “Why do you get mad when I ask that?” “I’m not mad…I just think…I don’t know…I’m just too tired to think…. It doesn’t matter what you do.”

If you’re going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool. If you haven’t got that you might as well gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won’t do you any good.

This is how it was before the white man came—beautiful lava flows, and scrawny trees, and not a beer can anywhere—but now that the white man is here, it looks fake.

We see much more of this loneliness now. It’s paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you’d think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn’t see it so much.