Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Couverture souple

Richardson, Mark

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0307390691 ISBN 13 : 9780307390691

Editeur : Vintage, 2009

Synopsis

Book by Richardson Mark

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Minnesota

I can tell from the sign by the bank, without turning my head from the road, that it’s nine thirty in the morning. The sign flashes to show it’s 80 degrees, and the heat’s already coming through my jacket. It’s going to be hot today. That’s okay—on a motorcycle, heat is always welcome.

The small town passes, and I’m back among the fields. The bike’s running well this morning, and both of us are stretching out a little, starting to relax on the road now that this trip’s finally under way. You’ll have to excuse me if I think of her sometimes as if she’s a person. It’s just me now, me and my old bike.

I’m on Highway 55, the original road that runs up from Minneapolis toward Minnesota’s northwest. This is an old road, made from concrete with flattened stones in the mix for hardness and ridges every few dozen feet that set up a clickety-clack sound like a locomotive on its tracks.

There aren’t many cars on this stretch of highway because anybody who’s really trying to get somewhere is on the interstate that runs alongside a couple of miles away. Sit on the inter- state and you don’t need to stop till you run out of gas. In fact, on the interstate, if you didn’t have to pull over every few hours and pay at the pump, there’d be no reason to ever slow down or even speak to anyone. Truckers do it all the time. Stay awake for long enough and you’ll be at the coast by Wednesday.

Not on this road, though. Trucks stay off this road. Clickety-clack. There’s been a track here for centuries, paved sometime in the 1920s or ’30s to better link farmers with their markets, Bible salesmen with their customers, children with their schools. This is the kind of road on which life happens, connecting other roads and streets and driveways and communities, not a thruway that picks you up here and throws you off there. It meanders around properties and makes way for the marshes that breed the ducks and red-winged blackbirds that take flight as I ride past. Clickety-clack.

The only way to truly experience a road like this is to be out in the open—not shut up in a car but riding along on top of it on a motorcycle. It’s tough to explain to someone who’s only ever traveled behind a windshield, sealed in with the comforting thunk of a closing door. On a bike there’s no comforting thunk. The road is right there below you, blurring past your feet, ready to scuff your sole should you pull your boot from the peg and let it touch the ground. The wind is all around you and through you while the sun warms your clothing and your face. Take your left hand from the handlebar and place it in the breeze, and it rises and falls with the slipstream as if it were a bird’s wing. Breathe in and smell the new-mown grass. Laugh out loud and your voice gets carried away on the wind.

At least that’s how it is on a warm, sunny day like this Monday morning. Some rain a couple of days ago was a struggle, but I won’t think about that now. There’ll be plenty of time for that later.

Clickety-clack. Somewhere beside the road near here should be a rest area with an iron water pump. Nearly four decades ago a couple of motorcycles stopped here, and their riders took a cool drink from the pump. Should be coming up on the left and—here it is. Just like in the book. This road really hasn’t changed much at all.

There’s a place to park the bike near some picnic tables under a shelter, and the grass drops down to a stream behind the trees. To one side is the iron hand pump that’s mentioned in the book. It still draws cool water. The spout is opposite the pump, so I have to dash around with my hands cupped to catch the gushing water. I capture just a trickle—I have no proper cup. The Zen riders would have brought a cup. Besides, there were four of them—enough for one to pump and another to drink. I’m on my own today.

Those Zen riders—they’re why I’m here. Robert Pirsig and his eleven-year-old son, Chris, on Pirsig’s old 28-horsepower, 305-cc Honda Superhawk CB77, and Pirsig’s friends John and Sylvia Sutherland on their new BMW R60/2. They were making a long summer ride back in 1968, and then Pirsig went and wrote about it and his book became a best seller. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is still in bookstores, and of the five million copies sold, two are in my saddlebags.

One of those two books is an early edition, liberated from the bookshelf in my aunt’s living room years ago because it had a picture of a motorcycle on its pink cover; the other is the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, larger and a little revised. And now here, at the first stop mentioned in the book, it’s the pink edition I pull out and read awhile, lying back on the grass.
I’ve always been curious about this book, although it took years for me to read it all the way through. I pulled it from that bookshelf one quiet afternoon, settled on the sofa, and was captivated by its first pages, by the evocative description of these ponds and marshes and the riders’ gentle progress. It tells the story of a man and his son, ostensibly Pirsig and Chris, on a vacation trip to San Francisco by motorcycle from their home in the twin cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul. This is the framework for a multilayered, intricately structured narrative that is far more about their personal struggles with inner demons than it is about getting to the coast. It’s also the platform from which Pirsig explores and explains his philosophy. Only a few pages in, the narrator wanders from his road trip to lament the lack of quality in his modern-day America, and that’s when my teenage attention tuned out. I took the book home anyway. There was something about that illustration on the back cover—a guy standing with his son, beside a motorcycle, looking away to the horizon.

A dozen years later, halfway through Philosophy 101 and getting nowhere, I found the book again and gave it another try. Reading slowly but steadily, I made it to the mountains of Montana before the term ended and other courses overwhelmed me. Something had clicked, though. Maybe it was Pirsig’s luggage list, his rhyming off of the same sweaters and gloves and rain gear that I’d grown accustomed to packing for frantic weekend trips to the mountains on my sport bike. More likely it was the items on the list that made us different: rope when I carried bungee cords; goggles instead of a full-face helmet; a cold chisel, a taper punch, and point files for those mysterious workings inside the bike’s engine, when I carried just a pair of Vise-Grips. Both of us were looking for the same thing from our travels, just using different tools.

It wasn’t until last summer that I picked up the book for a third time, looking for something to read on the first vacation in five years during which I could relax from some of the responsibilities of parenthood. That time, reading with a whole new perspective, I sailed right through. The guy got it! He wasn’t just looking for a nice vacation; he wanted to figure out “quality” as a thing in itself, not just a description—a noun, not an adjective. He wanted to learn what’s needed for his life—my life, everyone’s life—to move up a notch, to be the best it can be, truly harmonious in a world swamped by so many improvements that they buckle under the weight of their time-saving intentions. For me, as a busy parent juggling work with family, that perspective struck close to home.

But it’s showing its age, this book. It’s written in a folksy style that reminds me of my parents, and it refers constantly to the paraphenalia of a previous generation. Just a few pages in, reading now on the warm grass of the travelers’ pause at this exact place, I come to Pirsig’s description of Sutherland going through his luggage here and finding a pair of shoelaces and their joking about his overpacked bike. Shoelaces! These days, in 2004, my kids don’t even know how to tie shoelaces—their footwear uses Velcro.

If I want to update the journey, I must find out more about the people who forged it and follow their tire tracks for myself. The ultimate truth about the world is biography, wrote Pirsig much later, and while my tools will be different, the reward could still be great. Perhaps some of its lessons will rub off along the way.
Beyond the rest area the road is straight and predictable, rising and dipping through fields and swamps, bordered by blue and yellow wildflowers in the uncut verge. Every small pool I pass seems to have a heron at one end, eyeing the fish or the frogs and waiting to see which of them can stay more still, and ducks at the other end, paddling softly around the shoreline’s reeds. Such slow and lazy movement, while on the road itself the concrete stretches on and on, clickety-clack, as I ride steadily northwest and the hot sun slips across the sky.

At the side of the road up ahead there’s a dead animal, well picked over by predators and no longer recognizable for whatever it used to be. The road may be hot and sultry, but it is not kind. It’s hard and noisy and can kill anything in a blink if it’s not understood and treated with respect.

Back in Wisconsin a couple of days ago, riding to Minneapolis to start this journey, I passed through a national forest, and there, lying beside the road, was a bald eagle, huge and glassy eyed, its neck twisted. The bird’s feathers were scattered across the lane—a vehicle must have struck it as it swooped down for prey. I rode past, then doubled back and looked more closely, peering into its unseeing eyes and studying its sharp talons and perfect beak. Even in death it was intimidating.

A few miles on, as I was half watching wakeboarders on a river that flowed alongside the highway and was heading into the curves a little faster than usual, the tires hit a series of expansion joints filled with lines of slippery black bitumen. The leaning bike slid into the oncoming lane before I could correct it. Whoa! There was no one else on the highway and it was no big deal, but this anonymous roadkill here in Minnesota is a reminder of the road’s potential treachery.

After a while now there are railway tracks on the left and a train up ahead. The bike’s moving at maybe 60 miles an hour while the train is pressing along at ten less than that, so in a few minutes I catch up with it and begin to pass. The boxcars are covered in graffiti, and it’s tempting to watch every carriage as it slides by, reading the graffiti artists’ names. Eventually I reach the front and look across to the driver, who’s looking across at me. We wave to each other. Looking back, I see a blackbird fly- ing alongside on the right. Its red-tipped wings blur against the blue sky.

I take my feet off the pegs and skim them along the road, stretching my stiff legs. Holding the handlebars for balance, I lean into the wind, and it’s as if the bike is flying. The bird soon goes away and the train soon drops behind, but the feeling stays there as the miles roll on, clickety-clack, reluctant to fade.
At its heart, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a simple tale that praises basic values and decries ugly technology. Pirsig tells his story while riding the secondary roads across the Dakotas to the mountains, touching Yellowstone National Park before a pause in Bozeman, Montana. From there, he crosses into Idaho and over to Oregon before dipping down into California and reaching the Pacific coast and San Francisco. Pretty good trip, really.

In keeping with the theme, Pirsig’s bike was a simple one that he maintained himself along the way. He was a capable mechanic who had made his living writing technical manuals for com- puters and military hardware, and who took great pleasure in doing a precise job properly. He’d strive to achieve excellence—quality—in everything he did, applying exactly the correct amount of measured pressure to a nut to ensure it was tight without becoming burred, or spending those extra few minutes dripping oil on the bike’s drive chain to make certain it was properly lubricated. He couldn’t bear machinery that was not well tuned, be it an engine or a faucet, and he’d spend as much time as necessary to make sure a problem was fixed properly. Like my bike, his was a simple machine that responded well to simple care. For a man able to explain guided missile launch systems to their operators, the dissection of a two-cylinder motorcycle engine came easily.

Mind you, everything he learned came through trial and error. He tells of breaking down on a motorcycle trip with Chris up to Canada when the boy was probably about eight. It was raining hard, and the bike just stuttered to a halt. He checked all he could think of on the engine, shook the bike to hear the gas sloshing in the tank, pulled out the plugs, and eventually gave up. The two of them hitched home and returned with a trailer for the bike. Two weeks later, checking it over at home, Pirsig found the problem: he’d run out of gas. The sloshing was in the reserve tank, which he hadn’t switched on because he’d assumed he had plenty of gas and the rain was the cause. From then on, he didn’t assume anything and took the maintenance of his bike very seriously.

Most certainly he didn’t trust that others would invest the time and care that a problem deserved. There’s a lengthy diatribe in Zen and the Art against the mechanics who failed to diagnose the reason his bike’s engine seized and who butchered the motor in the process, rounding the bolts of the tappet covers with a wrong-size wrench and smacking a hole through the aluminum cover with a chisel. These were guys who listened to the radio while working, and Pirsig would have none of it. He eventually found the cause himself through a painstaking disassembly, and used the example to demonstrate the lack of concern for quality in many people’s lives—and, by extension, how a job’s worth doing properly.

Back then there was often a simple solution. If the bike broke down somewhere, you’d just unwrap the Honda tool kit and pull the engine apart to the piston rings right beside the road. If the electrics were flickering, you might wrap some foil from a cigarette pack around the contacts and be on your way; if the suspension collapsed, you could hike to a nearby farm and barter with the farmer for an old length of tractor spring to do the job till you got home. Maybe you’d even stay the night in the barn because it had gotten late and the farmer’s beautiful daughter would keep you company.

Not today, though. Today’s machines are filled with wizardry so that they’re more powerful, more responsive, and more reliable, so that they go even faster to wherever it is you’re going. They still break down, but their high-tech parts often can’t be fixed unless there’s a software patch; just throw the piece away and replace it with a new one, if there’s one in stock. You never get to search for a strip of foil from a cigarette pack or for a tractor spring, and you never meet the farmer’s daughter.
He’s well into his seventies now, Robert Pirsig. He lives in New England and works hard to remain a recluse. He’s written only one other book since Zen and the Art, an autobiographical novel called Lila, which delves even more deeply into the modern search for quality and morals, and which some, including Pirsig himself, consider the superior work, but although it’s sold more than half a million copies, it has not been a blockbuster.

I wrote to him and asked for a meeting, and he wrote back right away. “The best place to meet an author is on the pages of his book,” he wrote kindly, turning down the request. “Anywhere else is a disappointment, believe me.”

After all, the narrator of Zen and the Art, who is not Pirsig himself but a charac...

Revue de presse :

“Assured and poetic. . . . A sort of Cliff’s Notes version of the dense original, and as much of a biography of Pirsig as Richardson was able to piece together. . . . An enjoyable read. . . . Richardson is quite meticulous in describing the thoughts, sensations, even the superstitions many motorcyclists experience while riding.” —The Los Angeles Times“A harrowing account of the toll that themaking of one man’s masterpiece exacted not only on himself but on those around him.”—TheWall Street Journal“Most notably for fans of the original, Zen and Now pushes the story forward, through Richardson’s correspondence with the interview-averse Pirsig, his editor, his ex-wife, and a second son, Ted.” —The Boston Globe“Richardson’s strong narrative thread results in a page-turner that does right by the original. Zen and Now is sure to inspire a new generation of riders and readers to pick up Pirsig’s book and take to the open road in search of quality.” —Vince Darcangelo, Rocky Mountain News“Fans of Pirsig’s cult classic should read Richardson’s book if they want the true story of the author. . . . Richardson digs deep to unearth the motives behind his tormented mentor’s search for quality while embarking on a search of his own. . . . [Zen and Now is] an engrossing tale recounted with a journalist’s attention to fact and an adventurer’s appetite for the enlightening surprise.” —Scott Driscoll, Seattle Post-Intelligencer“A good read. . . . Although Richardson is on the trail of Pirsig, this book is as much about his own status in the universe and who he is as a father and a human being. It is charmingly written, honest to a fault and as unpretentious as Pirsig’s book was the opposite. Zen and Now invites the reader along on several levels; Richardson’s research into Pirsig and his life is impeccable and the book is full of all kinds of interesting little nuggets.” —Ted Laturnus, Toronto Globe and Mail“Zen and Now is a story worth telling, about a journey worth sharing–an entertaining, inspiring, and rewarding read.” —Neil Peart, bestselling author of Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Vintage
• Date d'édition: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0307390691
• ISBN 13: 9780307390691
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 288