19 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert M Pirsig
Robert Yard. Pirsig, Author of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,' Dies at 88
Robert Thou. Pirsig, whose "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," a dense and discursive novel of ideas, became an unlikely publishing phenomenon in the mid-1970s and a touchstone in the waning days of the counterculture, died on Monday at his home in South Berwick, Me. He was 88.
His publisher, William Morrow, announced his death, proverb his wellness had been declining. He had been living in Maine for the terminal 30 years.
Mr. Pirsig was a college writing instructor and freelance technical writer when the novel — its full title was "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values" — was published in 1974 to critical acclamation and explosive popularity, selling a one thousand thousand copies in its first twelvemonth and several million more since. (A kickoff novel, it would be followed past only one more, the less successful "Lila: An Research Into Morals," a kind of sequel, in 1991.)
The novel, with its peculiar only intriguing championship, ranged widely in its concerns, contemplating the relationship of humans and machines, madness and the roots of culture.
Todd Gitlin, a sociologist and the author of books about the counterculture, said that "Zen and the Fine art of Motorbike Maintenance," in seeking to reconcile humanism with technological progress, had been perfectly timed for a generation weary of the '60s revolt against a soulless high-tech globe dominated by a corporate and military-industrial lodge.
"There is such a affair as a zeitgeist, and I believe the book was pop because there were a lot of people who wanted a reconciliation — even if they didn't know what they were looking for," Mr. Gitlin said in 2013 in an interview for this obituary. "Pirsig provided a kind of soft landing from the euphoric stratosphere of the belatedly '60s into the real globe of adult life."
Mr. Pirsig'southward plunge into the grand philosophical questions of Western culture remained near the top of the best-seller lists for a decade and helped ascertain the post-hippie 1970s landscape as resoundingly, some critics have said, as Carlos Castaneda'southward "The Teachings of Don Juan" helped define the 1960s.
Where "Don Juan" pursued enlightenment in hallucinogenic feel, "Zen" argued for its equal availability in the brain-racking rigors of Reason with a uppercase R. Years after its publication, information technology continues to exist invoked by famous people when asked to name a book that affected them most securely — amongst them the one-time professional basketball role player Phil Jackson, the actors William Shatner and Tim Allen, and the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, a Nobel laureate.
Part road-trip novel, part treatise, part open letter to a younger generation, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" unfolds as a fictionalized account of a cross-country motorcycle trip that Mr. Pirsig took in 1968 with his 11-year-quondam son, Christopher, and two friends.
The narrative alternates between travelogue-like accounts of their 17 days on the road, from the Pirsigs' home in Minnesota to the Pacific Declension, and long interior monologues that he calls his "Chautauquas," after the open-air educational meetings at Lake Chautauqua, N.Y., popular with cocky-improvers since the 19th century.
Mr. Pirsig's narrator (his barely disguised stand-in) focuses on what he sees as two profound schisms. The first lay in the 1960s culture war, in which the "hippies" rejected industrialization and the technological values that had been embraced by the "straight" mainstream society.
The 2nd schism is in the narrator'south own mind, as he struggles in his hyperrational way to understand his recent mental breakdown. Mr. Pirsig, who was told he had schizophrenia in the early 1960s, said that writing the book was partly an try to make peace with himself after two years of hospital treatments, including electric stupor therapy, and the turmoil that he, his wife and children suffered every bit a result.
Describing both breakdowns, cultural and personal, Mr. Pirsig's narrator invokes the Civil War: "2 worlds growingly alienated and hateful toward each other, with everyone wondering if information technology volition always exist this style, a house divided against itself."
He adds: "What I'k trying to do here is put information technology all together. Information technology'south and then big. That's why I seem to wander sometimes."
(Mr. Pirsig's son Chris was later on also found to be mentally ill and institutionalized. He died in 1979 after being stabbed in a mugging outside the San Francisco Zen center where he had been living.)
In a foreword to the book, Mr. Pirsig told readers that despite its title, "Zen and the Fine art of Motorbike Maintenance" should "in no way be associated with that keen body of factual data relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice."
He added, "It's not very factual on motorcycles either."
Instead, he wrote later: "The motorcycle is mainly a mental phenomenon. People who accept never worked with steel have trouble seeing this."
He added, "A study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature written report of the art of rationality itself."
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The literary critic George Steiner, writing in The New Yorker, described the volume every bit "a profound, if somewhat clunky, articulation of the postwar American experience" and pronounced information technology worthy of comparison to "Moby-Dick" as an original American work. In London, The Times Literary Supplement chosen the book "disturbing, securely moving, total of insights."
(Not all reviewers were wowed. Writing in Commentary, Eva Hoffman found Mr. Pirsig's ruminations obtuse. "Beneath the complexity of disorganization," she said, "the picture of guild which the book presents and the panaceas it offers are distressingly naïve.")
One of Mr. Pirsig's primal ideas is that so-called ordinary experience and so-chosen transcendent experience are actually one and the same — and that Westerners only imagine them as carve up realms considering Plato, Aristotle and other early philosophers came to believe that they were.
But Plato and Aristotle were incorrect, Mr. Pirsig said. Worse, the mind-torso dualism, soldered into Western consciousness by the Greeks, fomented a kind of civil war of the listen — stripping rationality of its spiritual underpinnings and spirituality of its reason, and casting each into fake disharmonize with the other.
In his part gnomic, office mechanic'southward style, Mr. Pirsig's narrator declares that the real world is a seamless continuum of the material and metaphysical.
"The Buddha, the Godhead," he writes, "resides quite equally comfortably in the circuits of a digital estimator or the gears of a bike transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower."
Robert Maynard Pirsig was born in Minneapolis on Sept. 6, 1928, to Harriet and Maynard Pirsig. His father was a law professor and dean of the University of Minnesota Police School. As a child, Robert spoke with a falter and had problem making friends; though highly intelligent (his I.Q. was said to be 170), he was expelled from the University of Minnesota considering of failing grades.
Serving in the Ground forces earlier the get-go of the Korean War, he visited Japan on a go out and became interested in Zen Buddhism, and remained an adherent throughout his life. After his Ground forces service, he returned to the university and received bachelor's and principal's degrees in journalism.
He later studied philosophy at the University of Chicago and at Banaras Hindu University in Republic of india and taught writing at Montana State University in Bozeman and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also did freelance writing and editing for corporate publications and technical magazines, including the first generation of computer journals.
His offset marriage, to Nancy Ann James, ended in divorce. He married Wendy Kimball in 1978. She survives him, as do a son, Ted; a daughter, Nell Peiken; and 3 grandchildren.
Mr. Pirsig maintained that 121 publishing houses rejected "Zen" before William Morrow accustomed it. He was granted a $three,000 accelerate, merely an editor cautioned him against hoping the book would earn a penny more than. Within months of its release, it had sold 50,000 copies.
With the book's success Mr. Pirsig became famous, wealthy and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He also, he said, became thoroughly unnerved. After indelible a inundation of interviews, he began refusing them. He said he had reached the limits of his patience when fans started showing upwards at his business firm exterior Minneapolis.
His neighbors called them "Pirsig'due south Pilgrims." Nigh were young people in search of a guru. Mr. Pirsig wanted none of it.
"One morning I just woke up at iii," he told The Washington Post years later on. "I told my wife, 'I just take to get out of hither.' We had the camper packed in one-half an hr, and I was on the road." He stayed away for months at a fourth dimension, sometimes far out at sea on his boat.
In interviews, he lamented that he was not embraced by academic philosophy departments, and that his books were sometimes lumped with "new age" publications in bookstores.
The most-cult popularity of "Zen," though, puzzled him for years before he came upwardly with a theory. Writing in an afterword to the 10th-anniversary edition in 1984, he used a Swedish give-and-take (it was his mother'south native linguistic communication) to describe the miracle. "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," he wrote, was a "kulturbarer," or culture-bearer.
A culture-bearing book is not necessarily a groovy book, he said. Information technology does not change the culture. Information technology simply heralds a change already underway. "Uncle Tom's Cabin," an indictment of slavery published before the Civil War, was a culture-bearing book, he said.
"I was just telling my own story," he said in a short interview posted on his website. He had never intended to make a splash.
"I expressed what I thought were my prime number thoughts," he added, "and they turned out to be the prime thoughts of everybody else."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/books/robert-pirsig-dead-wrote-zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance.html
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