The High Road

The manuscript was rejected 121 times.

The one hundred and twenty second editor whose desk it landed on was James Landis at William Morris and Company. It was extremely long. 800,000 words. It was demanding. It attempted nothing less than to cover the history of western philosophy from Aristotle to Hegel by way of Plato, Hume, Kant and Locke. It did not have great mass appeal. The author, Robert Pirsig, had blended his book-long account of a motorcycle journey with a parallel discourse on why the Greek concept of virtue was identical to the mystical Eastern description of the Tao.

In later years, Landis was to say that the submission forced him to decide what he had entered the field of publishing for. There are books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Walden that challenge all the value assumptions of a society. For the first time in his career, he felt that he was reading something of similar import. He wrote back to the author, offering a standard $3000 advance, and told him not to be discouraged if it was the last payment he ever received. Money wasn’t the point of a book like this.

Then began the slow and laborious process of editing. The two of them began with four thousand 4” x 6” index cards containing the text. It took them four years to wrestle it down. The final version of the book was a quarter of the manuscript's original size. Landis presented it to his colleagues as the classic it was to eventually become. In introducing it, he said: “This is about living, about how to live, and at least by inference, about why.”

I first picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM to its devotees) at the age of sixteen. It was the summer between high school and college, and I was embarking on a trip to Goa that weekend. I was in search of a book about travel to accompany me, and this account of a motorcycle trip from Minneapolis to San Francisco seemed to fit the bill. Physically, I was bumping along towards Panjim in a compartment on the Vasco Express. Mentally, I was on a Super Hawk on the wide-open roads of the Great Plains. Pirsig’s frequent and odd meanderings into metaphysics I could make neither head nor tail of. There was a lot that I missed then.

It is rare for me to re-read a book, and never more than twice. ZMM is the singular exception. Five times since then, over three decades, I have gazed into the hypnotist’s crystal, with each effort illuminating a new facet of technology, art, and work.

At the surface level the book is structured as a travelogue, with the author and his teenage son Chris riding on one motorcycle and their friends John and Sylvia Sutherland on another. At stops along the way, Pirsig mulls over comments made by the others, each time mentally framing his response as a chatauqua.

A chatauqua is a lecture essay. The term itself hails from the name of a lake town in Upstate New York that grew famous in the late nineteenth century for a summer speaker series aimed at the edification of its people. ZMM’s framework alternates between a description of a leg of the motorcycle journey, some telling dialogue during a stop, and then a chatauqua that digs into the speaker’s world view, why it may have come to be, and how to address it.

Here is where it starts to get a bit complex. At page 65, Pirsig introduces a new character named Phaedrus (the name originates from that of a young Greek orator who served as a foil for Socrates.) The Phaedrus in this book is an earlier version of the author himself, someone who shared his life history but who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and who suffered a mental breakdown. Phaedrus was sent to a hospital to recover from the break, and subject to electroshock therapy.

Phaedrus (or the author pre-breakdown) had been a scholar of great intelligence. He had studied biochemistry at the University of Minnesota, then philosophy at the Banaras Hindu University, before teaching in Montana and finally immersing himself in epistemology at the University of Chicago. He had suffered the collapse during this last period. In his obsessive dive into the history of knowledge and the self, he had often gone for days without food or even sleep.

The electroshock had erased much of Pirsig's old personality but echoes of it resonate within him during this journey, like faintly received signals from an antenna. It is Pirsig (the present version) who is on this trip. But when he goes on his philosophical excursions, it is the memory of Phaedrus’s work that informs each chatauqua.

The first one deals with aversion to technology. At the book’s beginning, they emerge from a bar and John pumps away at his kick starter for fifteen minutes without getting the engine to fire. Pirsig suggests that maybe he should check if he has flooded the bike’s cylinders in error by having it on full choke. In that case the best thing to do would be to remove the plugs and air them out.?

John’s response instead is to be annoyed that buying a new BMW still takes the work of understanding its components and how they fit together. He wants nothing to do with engine tuning. It’s not because he isn’t smart – he could learn everything that he needs to maintain his motorcycle in ninety minutes. Rather, it is because of his world view. John finds anything to do with valves and shafts and wrenches dehumanizing. He came of age in the sixties, a time when the ethos was about art and peace and love.

This first chatauqua illustrates a fundamental dichotomy in our understanding of the world – classical and romantic. Classical understanding sees the world as underlying form. Romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.

If you showed a blueprint or schematic to a romantic, it would have no appeal to them because they would see only a dull, complex lists of lines and numbers. But that same document would fascinate a classical person because those symbols speak to a tremendous richness of underlying form.

The romantic mode, in contrast, is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative. Feelings dominate over facts. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. Rather, it is based on intuition and aesthetic.

If you considered, say, a pile of sand, the classical awareness of it would be to see the individual grains and to mentally sort them. By size, by shape, by grades of opacity and so on. Romantic understanding, on the other hand, is the gestalt, the entire pile before the sorting begins.

Motorcycle maintenance is purely classical. Motorcycle riding is romantic.

But they are really two sides of the same coin.

In one of the most famous passages in the book, Pirsig writes: “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”

How does one persuade a person who leans toward one worldview to appreciate another? How could Pirsig convey the classical view to John, that satisfaction that he finds from it? He ponders what he himself has internalized during the process of learning to maintain his motorcycle.

The first is that there is great benefit in self-reliance. While it is nice to hope that there will always be a nearby mechanic, that is not going to happen if you are two hundred miles down a side road in the Badlands.

The second is to keep a calm mental outlook. Pirsig approvingly quotes the first line of a Japanese manual: “Assembly of bicycle requires great peace of mind.”

The third is to give yourself plenty of time. Jammed schedules do not allow for depth of thought. To be deeply interested and involved, you must give yourself the room to do what Zen Buddhists call “just sitting.” When there is no subject-object duality, no separation from what you are working on, it becomes much easier to truly care about what is in front of you.

The fourth is to cultivate an awareness of (and separation from) ego. Being annoyed about the time it takes to do something well or tying your self-worth to a particular outcome are both unproductive. Any effort that has self-glorification as its goal is also not likely to have a good end. Have no wandering desire other than to properly perform the act at hand.

Fifth, cultivate gumption. This is an old Scottish word that has all but dropped from use in our vernacular. A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. They move inexorably forward, maybe in little steps at times, and course-correcting often, but always in the direction they have chosen. If a person has gumption and knows how to maintain it, there is absolutely no way that the motorcycle can keep from being fixed.?

Finally, start small. When Phaedrus was a writing instructor in Montana, he found that his students were overwhelmed by a large assignment such as writing about the city of Bozeman. Over time, he learned to ask them instead to write about a street, or a building, or even a brick. By narrowing their focus, they were able to get started. And they would eventually begin galloping along.

Phaedrus had been chartered with teaching composition. But he found that he was hobbled by the grading system. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants, you get a bad grade. It is an external compulsion and a real evil. Little children don’t have it. It seems to come later in life, possibly the result of school itself.

He sought originality in his student’s work. He therefore decided to get rid of grades for his class.

This confused them. If they weren’t working toward a grade, what were they there for?

Phaedrus had a blinding realization. An essay could be evaluated not just on its classical merits (whether it had proper grammar and punctuation and structure) or its romantic one (whether it was appealing.) All of philosophy through the previous two millennia had been a dialectic between the two. He saw a way to bridge the divide. He called it Quality.

He forced his students to become creative by deciding for themselves what was good writing instead of asking him all the time. The only place they would get a right answer was by looking within themselves.

They protested, of course. How were they supposed to know what Quality was? He was supposed to tell them!

Phaedrus went up to the blackboard and wrote: “Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a non-thinking process.” His definition of Quality was that it could not be defined.

To illustrate, he picked up two of the student compositions. The first was a rambling, disconnected thing with interesting ideas that never built up to anything. The second was magnificently constructed, cogent and conclusive. Phaedrus read both out loud, then asked for a show of hands on who thought the first was better. Two hands went up. He asked how many liked the second better. This time there were twenty-eight.

“Whatever it is,” he said, “that caused the overwhelming majority to raise their hands for the second one is what I mean by Quality. So, you know what it is.”

"What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good, need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"

It was a judo move. The withholding of grades forced the student to move towards the goal of Quality themselves. They could intuit that an essay of high Quality displayed unity. That would imply starting with an outline. For it to demonstrate authority, maybe it needed to rely on footnotes. Clarity, vividness, precision, depth - all the tropes of freshman comp were arrived at in reverse, each in service of Quality.

Over the centuries, the split between the classical and the romantic view had been characterized as the difference between objectivity and subjectivity. Phaedrus went straight between the horns of the dilemma by saying that Quality is neither a part of matter nor is it a part of mind. It is a third entity that is completely independent of the two. The equivalent concept in Eastern teaching, offering a third choice between yes-no, is called Mu. Un-ask the question is what it says.

The recognition of Quality is universal. If you transported someone from the steppes of Mongolia and showed them the Taj Mahal for the first time, they would be struck with awe. Not just because of how precisely its marble blocks fit together or the haunting image it offers in the moonlight, but because it has been designed and built with a unifying vision. Similarly, the Ode to Joy and the Hallelujah Chorus transcend country and religion. They call out to the spirit and the heart.

You don’t need to build a monument or write a symphony to create something of Quality. Towards the end of his trip, Pirsig stays the night at a motel in the town of Gardiner in Oregon. He points out things about their cabin to his son. The windows are all double-hung and sash-weighted. The doors click shut without looseness. All the moldings are perfectly mitered. There is nothing arty about all this, just well done. Something tells him that all the work was done by one person. Later that night, he learns that yes, indeed, it was by the elderly motel owner. He had built all the cabins himself.

Quality can be sought at a level as simple as sharpening a kitchen knife or sewing a dress or mending a chair. A person who sees Quality and feels it as they work is a person who cares. A person who cares about what they do is one who is likely to produce work of Quality. Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing.

In the far reaches, the journey's destination is the same. Quality is what Greek philosophy terms arete (or excellence), and what Indian philosophy calls Dharma (or duty.) The person that appears to be “in here” and the machine that appears to be “out there” are not two separate things. The real cycle you are working on is a cycle called yourself.