Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Essay Example

Soon after my sixteenth birthday, in the year I switched from regular high school to home schooling, our house burnt down. The event was an enormous shock: the loss of belongings, keepsakes and photos, and the memories associated with them, left me feeling cut off from many things, but also strangely elated. At a time in my life at which I was consciously crafting a new identity, the possibility of starting from scratch, so to speak, was very exciting.

My family and I moved into a beach-side cottage which we usually used for summer vacations. It is a small, intimate building, surrounded by dune forest, which my grandfather, who was a teacher, had acquired as a place to take his sabbaticals, and then left to his children. It is as much – more – home to me than anywhere else, being the one constant in a life of frequent relocation, and the association it carries, of summer vacations and time with family, make it very special.

I found myself alone for longer periods than I’d ever experienced before when we moved there. My mother, father and brothers spent much of the week in the city in order to avoid the long commute, while I, not being at school, and having lost my text-books in the fire, was left free to take long walks on the beach and through the forest in the beautiful spring weather.

It was during this period that I came across Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The title alone was enough to enthrall me: I had recently become interested in eastern religious thought, and the wonderful incongruity, which nevertheless points to a profound insight, of Zen and motorcycle maintenance had me captivated before I began.

The story itself, though, had perhaps the most thoroughgoing effect on me of anything I have ever read. Having recently begun to think along philosophical lines, and becoming more and more aware by the day of the scope and range of questions the with which the cosmos confronts us, the story of a one man’s strenuous, unswerving, and patient pursuit of a single line of enquiry through years and states of mind had an electrifying effect on my nascent vocation.

It was not, however, the philosophical aspect of the story which has had the most lasting effect. Rather, it is the way in which the book conjures a narrative out of philosophy and the pursuit of knowledge, and shows these latter two to be finally of a narrative nature in and of themselves, through the depiction of the intellectual odyssey of a fiercely integral and sensitive mind, which utterly changed my attitude to literature, philosophy, and life, and the ways in which these three interact.

The book is subtitled “An inquiry into values,” and the narrative recounts the protagonist’s pursuit of the idea of quality through many years, with a parallel plot, in the present, which deals with his attempts to repair his relationship with his son and come to terms with his son’s incipient mental illness. The narrative concludes with the convergence of the two plots, and a resolution to each offered by the solution to the other. Quality, the book seems to say, human value – whether philosophical or inter-personal – is profoundly tied up with our ability to tell stories and make sense of the world, ourselves and our relationships with others through narrative.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the beginning of a sustained and fruitful relationship with narrative and philosophy for me. The book not simply shows but actually enacts the ways in which humans find their way through the world by way of narrative, and has remained a source of inspiration, comfort and wonder from my first encounter with it until now.

Works Cited

Pirsig, R.  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  New York: Morrow, 1974.