Writer: Robert Pirsig
Genre: Philosophy
Do not let the genre be a turn off! A fabulous book that I caught hold of after a long long time. By the way it has got nothing to do either with Zen or motorcycle maintenance as such, but maintenance of motorcycles seems to serve as a good analogy for the author for explaining his point of view.
The book is a first person narration of a motorcycle journey of the author with his son, Chris and family friends from Minnesota to California. The book jumps between 2 characters - the author in his present state and a state in which he identifies himself as Phaedrus. Phaedrus, a rhetoric teacher and becomes engaged in identifying what is it that makes something better than something else. In short, he wants to define Quality. His pursuit of Quality drives him insane and the mental asylum changes his personality completely.
It’s almost impossible to explain the contents of this book without sounding insane yourself. It is class apart and you have to read it, understand it and accept it to understand its beauty. But yes, it’s not an easy read. You need patience and my idea is that if you love the book in the first 100 pages you will read it till the end or else keep it down immediately.
This one is going to be on my favourite list!
Some excellent quotes from the book:
"The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling."
"When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion."
"For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. "
Q:"Is it hard?
A: 'Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard."
..................and my personal favourite
"The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton."
...and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people's heads! It 's a ghost!"
Mind has no matter or energy but they cant escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don't get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. Science is in your mind too, it s just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either."
Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Law of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts."
