Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert Pirsig. 

3/5 rating. 

Book #132 of 2019. Read November 24, 2019.

This book started off pretty good, but then quickly brought me back to college classes of deep (waaaay too deep) philosophical discussions. Below is just one excerpt of the less-out there statements to put this in perspective:

“Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past.” 

If that sounds like mumbo-jumbo to you, absolutely skip this book! If not, just realize this book should probably be named “Phaedrus’s split personality and his deep philosophical utterances”. The book can basically be summed up with his question: “What is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good – need we ask anyone to tell us these things?” 

I don’t really know how to describe this book besides this. Just know it’s about 2/3 philosophy, 1/6 motorcycle maintenance, and 1/6 travel tale. It wasn’t a bad book, but I certainly can’t say I thoroughly enjoyed it…

Quotes:

“We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.”

“Laws of nature are human inventions(ital), like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show(ital) it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past.”.

“I feel happy to be here, and still a little sad to be here too. Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.”

“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge.”

“To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.”

“Any effort that has self-glorification as its final  endpoint is bound to end in disaster.”

“Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man.”

“The place to improve the world ia first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”

“The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It’s psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it’s reversed.”

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

IG Link.