Zen Post script spoiler, and seriously you don’t want to read this if you have not read the book yet:
In 1979, Pirsig’s first son Chris, who had played an important role in his first book, was stabbed to death during a mugging in San Francisco
I found it about as profound as The Celestine Prophecies. i.e. not very.
Yeah, it seems like the kind of thing you think is way deep when you’re 15. If you read it as an adult, its narrative and philosophical failures are just too obvious.
Then again, I threw “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” across the room with great force, so maybe I’m just too cynical for the 70s.
How do you feel about “Hope for the Flowers”? 
Which philosophical failures are those?
Oh man. There’s one I got about thirty pages into and then never picked up again. I knew so many people who swore by it, so I was expecting something other than a trite, overly simple, totally non-tenable world view couched in quasi-mystical language. Ugh.
Definitely quit right now. I hated this. Badly written, etc. The guy had no clue about Zen Buddhism at all. Inspired a trend of really awful “Zen and the Art of …” books.
Wow, you can really tell you read the book.
From the opening:
“…it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles, either.”
It didn’t even pretend to be about Zen Buddhism. :rolleyes:
I found two things about the book to be useful: his ruminations on Quality (which you can usually find sandwiched into a TQM course that all white-collar workers will eventually have to take), and his ruminations on “stuckness”. As an engineer, the two things I do most often are create products, which ought to have quality, and troubleshoot other people’s software models, which are often stuck.
The rest of the book I forget, except that he kept saying Chappaqua as though I were supposed to know where or what that was.
I didn’t.
I started it in college, and fell asleep (and I was even studying philosophy, so I am not anti-mental masturbation type text). That was no big deal, but I still feel guilty that my poor mother tried to read it so that she could understand me.
I have never told her that I couldn’t finish the drek.
I read it when I was 17 and a college freshman; I loved it. Then I read it when I was 23 (thirteen years ago), and only finished it because I still had such good associations with the first time I’d read it.
I realized pretty quickly during the second go-through that it seemed to be a bunch of fairly mundane “revelations” addressed in pointlessly elaborate detail. “Hey, what if the way you see ‘blue’ is actually what I see when I see ‘red’? Dude!”
ftg writes:
> Inspired a trend of really awful “Zen and the Art of …” books.
The title of the book was a parody of the title of an earlier book called Zen in the Art of Archery. In so far as I can determine, Pirsig’s book didn’t inspire a “trend” of books called Zen and the Art of X. There have been two or three such books, but that’s hardly a trend.
Two or three? I just checked the library catalog, and there were 18. Considering that most of those “Zen and the Art Of” books were ephemeral and therefore not suitable for library collections for any real length of time, I’d call that an irritating trend.
Particularly Zen and the Art of Diabetes Maintenance and Zen and the Art of Casino Gambling.
O.K., I’ll take your word for it. I searched Amazon for any books (in or out of print) with titles starting with “Zen and the Art of . . .” and only found two or three. You obviously have access to a better database than I do.
I enjoyed Zen a lot when I read it as a young lad in college (predictably). He had a nice style, good personal back story, I enjoyed the motorcycle metaphors.
I think it must be very difficult to write a popular philosophy book that doesn’t just get dismissed as new age imbecility. A lot of the comments in this thread are very sneering along these lines. It must be hard to find that middle ground where your ideas have a bit of analytical fibre, but are still digestible to us laypeople.
I did quit when I was halfway through. I loved the first half (sophmore year of college) and then it just kind of faded…his bizarre descent into a philosophy-fueled mental breakdown just became hard to wade through. I did come back to it about a year later and finish it. I was disappointed. I barely even remember the last third of the book now.
This book has actually become my benchmark for bad books. If I’m reading something I’m not finding too interesting, I think “well, at least it’s not Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance!”, and usually I feel better.
I did finish it, and I wish someone had told me to give up too. I think it’s the kind of thing that would seem really deep and meaningful if you were about 17 or perhaps on some mind-altering drugs, but I was 25 and painfully sober when I read it. Such a long, interminable, rotten piece of sanctimonious, pretentious dreck. I went from not caring about the main character to actively hating him. Actually, I have met many philosophy undergrads who talked in the same manner and clearly thought they were marvelously deep, and I felt the same way about them.
The book doesn’t really ‘arrive’ anywhere, but then again it isn’t meant to. You either enjoy the journey (not caring that the destination might not amount to much) or you don’t enjoy it at all. One might even wonder why it’s written as a novel at all. The author could just as easily have described his own derivative blend of quasi-mystical philosophy in a few pages and have had done with it. But he made the choice he did, without worrying too much about the kind of things good novels usually contain (character, plot, structure etc.) and hey, he must have struck a chord or got something right because a lot of people bought the book and said they enjoyed it.
Evidently, while it may be a verbose, unfocused offering that meanders clumsily through a selection of philosophical ideas, much as a freeloading drunk might nibble at the food at a high society wedding, many find the book to have some sort of charm that rewards the time necessary to reach the ending (or, more accurately, to reach the point where the author just couldn’t be bothered to type any more). It’s a choice each reader has to make for him or herself, but my advice would be: flip to the back and read the last ten or fifteen pages. Then ask yourself, now that you’ve seen the destination, exactly how much of your life you’re willing to spend getting there. If this process of analysis and evaluation results in a rapid book / bin interface scenario, then I salute your good taste. If not, I’m pretty sure I could drone on for a few pages about the difficulty of balancing one’s sense of personal volition and responsibility against an awareness of universal forces that are greater than the self and might allow us to transcend personal limitations. Anyone want to give me ten bucks?
I can only barely remember what that book was about, it had so little impact. Even way back in my younger days I could see that was a marshmallow of a book.
Updating this thread Robert Pirsig is dead at age 88: