Pirsig's book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," was certainly one of the foundational, formative books in my life. No doubt. I can easily say that it is one of the books that "changed my life." It came to me at a very impressionable time.
I was a Searcher. Searching. A perfect reader.
I can see the young me, hitch-hiking from Chicago to San Diego with a copy of Pirsig's book buried deep in my back-pack, deep in my consciousness. Looking for something.
I was too aware of my own clunkiness, didn't trust myself driving a motorcycle, plus, I was pretty poor, I think I had about $100 in my shoe as I stood on a corner trying to flag down a ride.
I have read the book many times. It always engages on many levels. It's always a bit daunting, haunting, and a bit out of my grasp. Weighty and profound things, the essence of things, hung on a simple story, a journey, a father and son on a motorcycle trip.
Body & Spirit. Reason & Passion. Ideas & Action. Dualities. Finding Zen in the day to day, in a motorcycle engine, in a life-well lived. Zen - not meditating on a mountain, but right here, right now in the common, mundane, real world. Reason in the Madness.
It propelled me on an intellectual journey, a spiritual journey, led me to the many doors of Zen and meditation, and alternative lifestyles. I was propelled out into the world, and at the same time propelled inward. Life as a search, as a journey. That has defined how I have thought of my life, and how I have lived my life ever since.
Robert Pirsig's journey in a weird way was my journey too. And of course, I was just one of many. As Pirsig explains it:
The near-cult popularity of “Zen,” though, puzzled him for years before he came up with a theory. Writing in an afterword to the 10th-anniversary edition in 1984, he used a Swedish word (it was his mother’s native language) to describe the phenomenon. “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” he wrote, was a “kulturbarer,” or culture-bearer.
A culture-bearing book is not necessarily a great book, he said. It does not change the culture. It simply heralds a change already underway. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” an indictment of slavery published before the Civil War, was a culture-bearing book, he said.
“I was just telling my own story,” he said in a short interview posted on his website. He had never intended to make a splash.
“I expressed what I thought were my prime thoughts,” he added, “and they turned out to be the prime thoughts of everybody else.”