Friday, December 26, 2014

Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

from the diary, January 2, 1989:

"I finished Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance yesterday. It was good, though I’m not really sure why the main character (Phaedrus?) took everything so seriously and went mad or what all that deconstruction of Socrates was about. I’m still not sure what a Sophist is, and while I have an idea of what the author [Robert Pirsig] meant when he talked about Quality I’m not at all sure."

The copy of Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was left at the house by my dad on one of his visits. I don’t think it was a gift so much as he was done with it and was leaving it. Not that he would have objected to me or my brother reading it, of course. The paperback was water- or sun-warped. It struck me as a Dad kind of book. Philosophy for the casual autodidact.

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