The path of the book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” came out to be very long and thorny. Robert Pirsig had to face one hundred and twenty-one refusals from publishing houses, until they agreed to publish his book, making it a masterpiece of American classics. More than four million copies of the book have been spread around the world, carrying the philosophical thoughts of the author in the heads of all motorcycle lovers. It has become a cult and has been mentioned more than once in other works, as an example of the philosophy of motorcyclists and the perception of the world.
The book combines in itself a story of the narrator traveling with his son, and his thoughts on the values of life, a romantic and technical worldview, quality, inspiration for work, showing all this through the prism of repair and maintenance of a motorcycle. The author compares each deep philosophical observation in application with the maintenance of a motorcycle, whether it is replacing sparking plugs, adjusting valves or just riding a motorcycle under different weather conditions. Each philosophical argument is named in the text Chautauquas, and includes a description of the problem, projecting it onto the outside world, the narrator’s acquaintances, situations in which they get with his son during a trip. In this, the author sees his Tao. Each meditation of the narrator can show a simple topic from different angles, and each topic is relevant to a reader. In every philosophical analysis of the sound of the engine, there is a description of the quality of the subject, the creator's love for the constructed, and proper, high-quality care for it to maintain performance, and to gain inspiration in the operation of the subject.
Very often the narrator turns his thoughts to his past, trying to understand exactly when this desire to explain and organize everything was born in him, so that the repair and maintenance of the motorcycle would not seem something scary to a simple owner of a bike, would not frighten him, but, on the contrary, would carry him away and put interesting tasks to solve. At these moments, when the narrator returns to his past, to the memories of his work at the university and another life, he learns of his true self. The road that the narrator rides with his son on a motorcycle, represents a return to the source and self-knowledge through memories. That, another life, seems to the narrator as a way of organizing thoughts in his head, understanding the world, composing his Chautauqua.
The author tells everything with the same enthusiasm and zeal. He is fascinated by the problems of finding inspiration for repairing a motorcycle, as well as the problems of a rusted nut, which could not be twisted. And both of these problems will be carefully analyzed by the narrator, and a solution will be found for them that can satisfy an inquiring mind. And after that there will be a new problem, the search for a solution to which will carry away into discussions about the ways of its research.
It is the interest of the topic, the study of problems and the search for solutions that make the storytelling easy, smoothing out the descriptions of the subtleties of metaphysics and abruptly switching the story from traveling deep into allegorical comparisons to reveal those that the narrator raises when is faced with a new motorcycle repair.
Any difficult topic revealed by Pirsig becomes clear and easy. The book displays an endless variety of interesting thoughts and conclusions, flavored with the romanticism of traveling by motorcycle and its maintenance. The entire journey of the narrator and his son does not just look like riding a motorcycle from point to point, which never happens, but a road full of thoughts and philosophy, time to search for answers within oneself, to important and exciting questions. The author offers a solution formula for analyzing the search for answers to impossible tasks, which will always be relevant and can be applied in any environment.
