Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance
by Robert Pirsig
Read June-July, 2007
Copy borrowed from Ramsey County Public Library, Maplewood branch
Essay written September 29th, 2007
I started reading this book the first time in the summer of 2003. I loved it at the beginning, but then after a hundred pages or so it started talking about the Buddha and my interest waned. So I quit.
This spring and summer my mind was more open to Eastern philosophy in general, and Zen in particular. I was in a spiritually questing frame of mind. So I decided this book was worth revisiting. Tracked it down, dove in, loved it at the beginning. Loved it until about the halfway point, page 200 or so. I can't pinpoint the exact page that I started getting lost, but I know I was beyond the point of no return.
The last couple of hundred pages were murder. This book took me to levels of abstraction that I was unprepared for. And the title was misleading. The motorcycle maintenance stuff was awesome. There was very little zen. Mostly it was the analysis of his elaborate philosophy of quality. Which was fine, but it was laborious, and basically meaningless to me. That was a shame.
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