Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Quotes Quality

Zen and the Fine art of Motorbike Maintenance (excerpts)

The reply is Phćdrus' contention that classic understanding should not be overlaid with romantic prettiness; classic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level.
— Robert Chiliad. Pirsig

Below are my favourite quotes and passages from the "Zen and the Fine art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values" by Robert M. Pirsig.

The book speaks eloquently and incisively about a lot of what is important to me: finding combinations of thoughts and feelings about art and science and apply them to finer visually communicate complicated concepts and data.

Image from The Velobanjogent.

" The melancholy know that many of the things we most want are in tragic conflict: to experience secure and nonetheless to exist free; to have money and withal not to have to be beholden to others; to be in close-knit communities and still not to be stifled past the expectations and demands of gild; to explore the earth and yet to put downwardly deep roots; to fulfil the demands of our appetites for food, sex and sloth and yet stay sparse, sober, faithful and fit.

" The truth knocks on the door and yous say, "Go abroad, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.

" "Whats new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, just one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an countless parade of trivia and manner, the silt of tomorrow.

" "Dad?" "What?" A small bird rises from a tree in front end of u.s.a.. "What should I exist when I abound up?" The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don't know what to say. "Honest," I finally say.

" But there are human forces stronger than logic.

" But the biggest clue seemed to exist their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, low-key—and uninvolved. They were similar spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the task. No proverb, "I am a mechanic." At 5 P.K. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cutting it off and not take another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts nigh their work on the chore. In their own way they were achieving the same matter John and Sylvia were, living with engineering without actually having anything to do with it. Or rather, they had something to do with information technology, just their own selves were outside of it, detached, removed. They were involved in information technology only not in such a way every bit to care.

" The mechanics in their attitude toward the machine were actually taking no dissimilar mental attitude from the manual's toward the motorcar, or from the mental attitude I had when I brought it in there. We were all spectators. And information technology occurred to me there is no transmission that deals with the real concern of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring nearly what yous are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

" The new ones start out every bit good-looking strangers and, depending on how they are treated, degenerate rapidly into bad-interim grouches or even cripples, or else turn into good for you, skillful-natured, long-lasting friends.

" So we move down the empty road. I don't want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even end or even continue going. We are just moving down the empty road.

" I was going at information technology in terms of underlying form. He was going at information technology in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing what the shim was. That's how I arrived at that stardom. And when you see what the shim is,in this instance, information technology's depressing. Who likes to think of a beautiful precision machine fixed with an quondam hunk of junk?

" Some things yous miss considering they're then tiny you overlook them. But some things you don't see because they're so huge. Nosotros were both looking at the same thing, seeing the same thing, talking well-nigh the same thing, thinking about the same thing, except he was looking, seeing, talking and thinking from a completely different dimension.

" What y'all've got hither, actually, are two realities, i of firsthand artistic appearance and one of underlying scientific explanation, and they don't friction match and they don't fit and they don't actually accept much of anything to do with 1 another.

" I desire to split human understanding into two kinds—classical understanding and romantic understanding.

" A classical agreement sees the globe primarily equally underlying grade itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of firsthand appearance.

" The romantic manner is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. "Art" when it is opposed to "Science" is often romantic. It does not keep past reason or by laws. Information technology proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience. In the northern European cultures the romantic manner is ordinarily associated with femininity, simply this is certainly not a necessary clan.

" The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws—which are themselves underlying forms of idea and behavior. In the European cultures it is primarily a masculine mode and the fields of science, law and medicine are unattractive to women largely for this reason. Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely archetype. The clay, the grease, the mastery of underlying grade required all give information technology such a negative romantic appeal that women never become near information technology.

" Although surface ugliness is often found in the classic manner of understanding information technology is non inherent in it. In that location is a classic esthetic which romantics oftentimes miss because of its subtlety. The archetype style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring lodge out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is non an esthetically costless and natural mode. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control. Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this command is maintained.

" To a romantic this archetype mode often appears deadening, awkward and ugly, like mechanical maintenance itself. Everything is in terms of pieces and parts and components and relationships. Nothing is figured out until information technology'southward run through the calculator a dozen times. Everything's got to exist measured and proved. Oppressive. Heavy. Incessantly greyness. The death forcefulness.

" Within the classic mode, however, the romantic has some appearances of his ain. Frivolous, irrational, erratic, untrustworthy, interested primarily in pleasure-seeking. Shallow. Of no substance. Often a parasite who cannot or will not carry his own weight. A real elevate on club. By at present these battle lines should sound a piddling familiar.

" The commencement is that the motorcycle, so described, is almost impossible to empathize unless you already know how one works. The firsthand surface impressions that are essential for primary understanding are gone. But the underlying class is left.

" Classical agreement is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the scattering of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other.

" When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to feel, something is always killed in the process. That is adequately well understood, at least in the arts. Marking Twain'southward feel comes to mind, in which, subsequently he had mastered the analytic cognition needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its dazzler. Something is always killed. Simply what is less noticed in the arts—something is e'er created also. And instead of just dwelling house on what is killed it's important too to see what'southward created and to come across the process as a kind of death-birth continuity that is neither expert nor bad, simply just is.

" Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

" No i really knew him. That is evidently the way he wanted it, and that's the way it was. Perhaps his aloneness was the result of his intelligence. Perhaps it was the cause. But the 2 were always together. An uncanny solitary intelligence.

" Just apart from a personality what is at that place? Some bones and flesh. A drove of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person. The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other manner around.

" There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorbike and never will be, simply when you come as close equally these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying beyond the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every fashion.

" I've noticed that people who take never worked with steel have trouble seeing this—that the motorbike is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metallic with given shapes—pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts—all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. Only a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees "steel" as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you desire if you are skilled enough, and any shape merely the 1 y'all want if you are not. Shapes, like this tappet, are what you arrive at, what you give to the steel. Steel has no more shape than this old pile of dirt on the engine here. These shapes are all out of someone's heed. That's of import to meet. The steel? Hell, fifty-fifty the steel is out of someone'southward heed. There's no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told yous that.

" Scientific questions often take a surface advent of dumbness for this reason. They are asked in order to prevent dumb mistakes later on.

" In the temple of science are many mansions-and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them in that location.

" What has brought them to the temple-no single answer will cover-escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of ane'due south own shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surround into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the withal pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

" I feel happy to be here, and still a little sad to exist here also. Sometimes information technology's a little better to travel than to arrive.

" He'south unable to comprehend things when they announced in the ugly, chopped-up, grotesque sentence style mutual to engineering and technical writing. Science works with chunks and $.25 and pieces of things with the continuity presumed, and DeWeese works only with the continuities of things with the chunks and $.25 and pieces presumed. What he really wants me to damn is the lack of creative continuity, something an engineer couldn't care less about. It hangs upwards, actually, on the classic-romantic split, like everything else about applied science.

" "Well, it isn't just art and applied science. It's a kind of a noncoalescence between reason and feeling. What's wrong with engineering is that it'south non connected in any real mode with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so information technology does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that. People haven't paid much attention to this earlier because the big concern has been with food, vesture and shelter for everyone and technology has provided these. "But at present where these are assured, the ugliness is being noticed more and more than and people are asking if nosotros must always suffer spiritually and esthetically in gild to satisfy material needs.

" I retrieve present-24-hour interval reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you become also far beyond it you're presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I remember this fear of insanity is comparable to the fright people one time had of falling off the edge of the earth. Or the fearfulness of heretics. There's a very close analogue at that place.

" It seemed every bit though every rule he honestly tried to detect with them and acquire with them was so total of exceptions and contradictions and qualifications and confusions that he wished he'd never come beyond the rule in the get-go place.

" And what he really thought was that the rule was pasted on to the writing after the writing was all done. Information technology was post hoc, after the fact, instead of prior to the fact. And he became convinced that all the writers the students were supposed to mimic wrote without rules, putting down whatever sounded right, then going back to see if it nevertheless sounded correct and changing information technology if information technology didn't.

" He only felt that no writer ever learned to write by this squarish, by-the-numbers, objective, methodical approach. Still that was all rationality offered and there was zip to exercise most information technology without beingness irrational

" She couldn't remember of anything to write virtually Bozeman because she couldn't recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could wait and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to exercise some original and direct seeing.

" Equally a event of his experiments he concluded that faux was a real evil that had to be cleaved before real rhetoric didactics could brainstorm. This imitation seemed to exist an external coercion. Little children didn't take information technology. Information technology seemed to come after on, possibly as a result of school itself.

" When you attempt to climb a mountain to prove how big y'all are, yous almost never make it. And even if you do it'southward a hollow victory. In guild to sustain the victory you have to evidence yourself over again and over again in another style, and again and over again and again, driven forever to fill up a false image, haunted by the fright that the prototype is non true and someone will observe out. That'south never the way.

" The purely intellectual pursuits were the to the lowest degree afflicted by the subtraction of Quality. If Quality were dropped, simply rationality would remain unchanged. That was odd. Why would that be?

" Squareness. When you decrease Quality you lot become squareness. Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.

" Y'all accept your analytic knife, put the signal straight on the term Quality and only tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two—hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic—and the split is clean. In that location's no mess. No slop. No piddling items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break.

" Romantic Quality always correlated with instantaneous impressions. Foursquare Quality e'er involved multiple considerations that extended over a catamenia of time. Romantic Quality was the present, the here and now of things. Classic Quality was ever concerned with more than just the present. The relation of the present to the past and future was always considered. If yous conceived the by and future to be all contained in the nowadays, why, that was not bad, the nowadays was what you lived for.

" I matter about pioneers that you don't hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers. They go forging ahead, seeing but their noble, afar goal, and never notice any of the crud and debris they leave behind them. Someone else gets to clean that up and it's not a very glamorous or interesting job.

" The truthful work of the inventor consists in choosing amongst these combinations so as to eliminate the useless ones, or rather, to avoid the trouble of making them, and the rules that must guide the option are extremely fine and fragile. It'southward almost incommunicable to state them precisely; they must exist felt rather than formulated.

" I call back it's important at present to tie care to Quality by pointing out that care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it equally he works is a person who cares. A person who cares nearly what he sees and does is a person who'due south jump to take some characteristics of Quality.

" This eternally dualistic subject-object way of budgeted the motorbike sounds right to the states because we're used to information technology. Simply it's not right. It's e'er been an bogus interpretation superimposed on reality. It's never been reality itself. When this duality is completely accepted a certain nondivided relationship between the mechanic and motorcycle, a craftsmanlike feeling for the work, is destroyed. When traditional rationality divides the world into subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you're actually stuck it's Quality, not any subjects or objects, that tells you where you ought to go.

" Romantic reality is the cutting edge of experience. Information technology's the leading edge of the train of noesis that keeps the whole train on the track. Traditional knowledge is only the collective memory of where that leading border has been.

" The leading edge is where absolutely all the action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the time to come. Information technology contains all the history of the past. Where else could they be contained?

" If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.

" The fear of stuckness is needless because the longer y'all stay stuck the more than y'all see the Quality—reality that gets you unstuck every time. What's really been getting you lot stuck is the running from the stuckness through the cars of your train of knowledge looking for a solution that is out in front of the train.

" Nature has a non-Euclidian geometry of her ain that seems to soften the deliberate objectivity of these buildings with a kind of random spontaneity that architects would do well to written report.

" The real ugliness is not the outcome of any objects of applied science. Nor is information technology, if 1 follows Phćdrus' metaphysics, the result of any subjects of engineering, the people who produce it or the people who utilise it. Quality, or its absence, doesn't reside in either the discipline or the object. The real ugliness lies in the relationship betwixt the people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a like human relationship between the people who apply the technology and the things they use.

" This is the tat tvam asi truth of the Upanishads, simply it's also reflected in modern street argot. "Getting with it," "digging information technology," "grooving on it" are all slang reflections of this identity. Information technology is this identity that is the ground of adroitness in all the technical arts. And it is this identity that mod, dualistically conceived technology lacks. The creator of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. The possessor of information technology feels no particular sense of identity with it. The user of information technology feels no particular sense of identity with it. Hence, by Phćdrus' definition, it has no Quality.

" The style to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from engineering science. That'south impossible. The way to resolve the disharmonize is to intermission downward the barriers of dualistic idea that prevent a real understanding of what technology is— not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both.

" The nature of our culture is such that if y'all were to await for instruction in how to do any of these jobs, the pedagogy would always give simply one understanding of Quality, the archetype. It would tell you how to hold the bract when sharpening the knife, or how to apply a sewing machine, or how to mix and apply glue with the presumption that in one case these underlying methods were applied, "good" would naturally follow. The ability to run into directly what "looks good" would exist ignored.

" The effect is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that information technology must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make information technology acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now information technology's not just depressingly slow, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents.

" Information technology'south the style that gets you lot; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit past people who, though stylish, don't know where to start considering no one has always told them there's such a thing as Quality in this earth and information technology'south real, non style. Quality isn't something yous lay on top of subjects and objects similar tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must commencement.

" The answer is Phćdrus' contention that classic agreement should not be overlaid with romantic prettiness; classic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level.

" It'southward been necessary since before the time of Socrates to turn down the passions, the emotions, in social club to free the rational heed for an understanding of nature's order which was every bit withal unknown. Now it'southward time to further an understanding of nature's social club past reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness, are a function of nature'south order too. The cardinal part.

" We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no creative cognition and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not only bad, it is ghastly. The fourth dimension for real reunification of art and technology is actually long overdue.

" The way to see what looks proficient and empathize the reasons it looks skillful, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.

" I say inner peace of mind. It has no direct relationship to external circumstances. It can occur to a monk in meditation, to a soldier in heavy combat or to a machinist taking off that final ten-thousandth of an inch. Information technology involves unselfconsciousness, which produces a complete identification with one'due south circumstances, and there are levels and levels of this identification and levels and levels of quietness quite as profound and difficult of attainment equally the more familiar levels of activity. The mountains of achievement are Quality discovered in 1 direction merely, and are relatively meaningless and often unobtainable unless taken together with the ocean trenches of self-awareness—and then different from selfconsciousness—which result from inner peace of mind.

" This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to reach, although there are levels and levels of this besides, equally attested past the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which 1 has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more than difficult, but tin be accomplished. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest.

" When one isn't dominated by feelings of separateness from what he'southward working on, then one can be said to "care" about what he's doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one's doing. When ane has this feeling and so he likewise sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself.

" Sometimes, when thinking nigh this, I idea that the idea that i person'southward listen is attainable to another'southward is just a conversational illusion, just a figure of speech, an assumption that makes some kind of exchange between basically conflicting creatures seem plausible, and that really the human relationship of i person to another is ultimately unknowable. The endeavor of fathoming what is in another'southward heed creates a distortion of what is seen.

" The gumption-filling process occurs when ane is quiet long enough to meet and hear and experience the real universe, non just one'southward own stale opinions about it. But it's cypher exotic. That'due south why I like the word.

" Because we're unaccustomed to information technology, nosotros don't normally meet that at that place'southward a tertiary possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don't even have a term for it, and so I'll accept to utilise the Japanese mu.

" Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices—Television receiver, jets, freeways and so on—but I promise it's been fabricated plain that the real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity.

" Phćdrus saw Aristotle equally tremendously satisfied with this neat lilliputian stunt of naming and classifying everything. His world began and ended with this stunt. The reason why, if he were not more than two thousand years dead, he would have gladly rubbed him out is that he saw him as a epitome for the many millions of self-satisfied and truly ignorant teachers throughout history who take smugly and callously killed the creative spirit of their students with this dumb ritual of assay, this blind, rote, eternal naming of things.

" They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the by receding away before their eyes.

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