If you must…
That bit of Highway 1 doesn’t look much different either.
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Of course.
I have a feeling Pirsig made the same mistake.
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I read ZATAOMM again about two years ago and the philosophy stuff was a lot denser than I’d remembered from reading it in high school. I made an effort to really digest it this time, so there was a lot of turning back and rereading chapters.
Godspeed you along paved county roads, Mr. Pirsig.
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Neither had much magic for me in the first place. Pirsig seemed alternarely obviois or cliche or absurdly academic. Castaneda just seemed you’d take his word for something you could not verify. They were great books, but just didn’t resonate.
Strange, because I have both taken psycdelics and now built a motorcycle (frame) largely from scratch. I have an apreciation for the meaning behind both, but only when experienced first hand.
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Just tried three days ago to explain to my granddaughter that the motorcycle we were working on is ourselves. She sort of got it. Wish I’d bought the first edition I saw awhile back.
And I always thought Castaneda was crap
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That book made a big impression on me when I first read it in the '70s.
I’ll cut some shims from an empty aluminum beer can in his memory.
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Damn.
His philosophy was a bit simplistic and clichéd, but his writing wasn’t. And he was a genuine Real Motorcyclist™, who got what it was about.
He’ll be missed.
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“Zen was published in 1974, after being rejected by 121 publishing houses.”
Even if you haven’t read the book, there’s a lesson to be learned about Pirsig’s persistence. It’s funny that a couple people here mentioned the shims. His take on beer can shims is what I remember most about that book. It’s been 25 years since I read it.
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Traveling across the best parts of America during its bicentennial year on a CB750 sounds like an amazing experience. Great pic.
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Thanks, I wrote this on the 4th of July on that trip.
the dark miles answer a half awake journey while the empty places whirl by blind to his speeding presence, another mystery dawns on this highway’s asphalt paradise…
Papasan 1976
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There’s what’s called "mechanic’s feel,‘’ which is very obvious to those who know what it is, but hard to describe to those who don’t; and when you see someone working on a machine who doesn’t have it, you tend to suffer with the machine.
The mechanic’s feel comes from a deep inner kinesthetic feeling for the elasticity of materials. Some materials, like ceramics, have very little, so that when you thread a porcelain fitting you’re very careful not to apply great pressures. Other materials, like steel, have tremendous elasticity, more than rubber, but in a range in which, unless you’re working with large mechanical forces, the elasticity isn’t apparent.
With nuts and bolts you’re in the range of large mechanical forces and you should understand that within these ranges metals are elastic. When you take up a nut there’s a point called "finger-tight’’ where there’s contact but no takeup of elasticity. Then there’s "snug,‘’ in which the easy surface elasticity is taken up. Then there’s a range called "tight,‘’ in which all the elasticity is taken up. The force required to reach these three points is different for each size of nut and bolt, and different for lubricated bolts and for locknuts. The forces are different for steel and cast iron and brass and aluminum and plastics and ceramics. But a person with mechanic’s feel knows when something’s tight and stops. A person without it goes right on past and strips the threads or breaks the assembly. --Pirsig, ZATAOMM
This speaks to anyone who has tried to convey an appreciation of body-knowledge to a person who is oblivious to everything but head-knowledge, doesn’t it? In some ways, philosophers and psychologists are just beginning to catch up with what blacksmiths and mechanics have known for ages.
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Philosophers have been arguing about that distinction for millennia. See Plato/Aristotle/etc on episteme vs techne.
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Good point, but more recently we’ve got hard evidence amenable to the head-knowledge sophists; Lakoff and friends have been amassing a pretty convincing argument for embodied cognition that is not based on syllogism and pure reason (the way the ancients’ were) or subjective experience (the way Pirsig’s was) but rather on objectively available phenomena and repeatable experiment.
I guess what I was trying to say was that Pirsig brought this to me, and I think to @joeair61, in a very personal way. The passage I quoted is one that has stuck with me since I read the book, shortly after it was written. It speaks directly to mechanics, relating Pirsig’s concept of the “gumption trap” to real embodied experience.
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Wow. that really helped me understand/remember why I was so angry at that book. I mean, It was assigned to me as summer reading for an English class, which is probably the absolute worst way to introduce someone to a great book. A lot of other kids seemed to dig it, though.
I had the exact same reaction you describe, of empathizing more with the son. My dad used to drag me and my sisters (and then just me, when my sisters couldn’t be made to do anything) on overly-long cross country skiing, biking and hiking trips that were definitely more about his need to get out of the house and out of society than sharing an experience with his kids. That combined with my Dad’s tendency to be confused by the world in a way that distanced him from us, and to endlessly try to puzzle things out on a deep, philosophical level while important, simpler realities seemed to whiz over his head made me resent Persig in ways I couldn’t understand at the time.
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i read it long ago. i own a 305 honda.
i never thought it had anything to do with mechanics. and everything to do with what goes through your brain as you end a relationship.
it’s a good book, I enjoyed it, but? a life working on bikes always led me to this truth:
“we are not in control. improvise and make the best of it”
whenever I started feeling in control? a bike tosses me on my butt. 
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Son, is that you?
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Okay, time to get off the sofa and into the garage to wake the bike* from it’s hiatus and get on the road again.
*1996 Honda Africa Twin
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It might be heresy around here, but that’s how I felt about my 2nd reading of Masks of the Illuminati. (The Illuminatus! trilogy held up fine on the 2nd reading.)
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