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It didn’t take long after I
began reading through my new Yanmar diesel shop manual that
I found myself thumbing through my old dog-eared copy of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the classic
philosophical novel written by Robert M. Pirsig and first
published in 1974 (complete title: Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values). The
book chronicles his motorcycle journey with his son from
Minneapolis to San Francisco as the backdrop for a discourse
on the metaphysics of quality—what he describes as a
“Chautauqua“ on which he digs deeper into old thought
processes. |
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It is the same book that
provided me with the insight and ability to repair a 35 mm
camera by completely disassembling and then reassembling it
years ago when I could not afford to pay to have it done by
professional technologists. So it only made sense, then, to
resurrect the book in respect to the diesel because whatever
it is—motorcycle, diesel, camera, boat—it is a machine, and
as Pirsig wrote: The real cycle is yourself … the machine
‘out there’ … and the person ‘in here’ grow toward quality
or fall away from quality together. And that principle
holds true whether you are maintaining a diesel, polishing
the brightwork, or sailing a course to a distant shore. |
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It only made sense that when
Pirsig returned from the high country of the mind, he would
settle on the sea, and in 1975 he purchased a cutter rigged
Westsail-32 which he christened Aręte. He gave some
hint of his predilection toward the sea when he wrote near
the end of Zen:
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Coastal people
never really know what the ocean symbolizes to
landlocked inland people—what a great distant
dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest
levels of subconsciousness, and when they arrive
at the ocean and the conscious images are
compared with the subconscious dream there is a
sense of defeat at having come so far to be
stopped by a mystery that can never be
fathomed. The source of it all. |
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The autumn voyage on which
he moved his boat from Bayfield Wisconsin on Lake Superior
to Florida through the Great Lakes to New York City via the
Erie Canal/Mohawk River Route of the New York State
Waterways and the Hudson River provides the backdrop to
Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, his follow-up novel to
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig then
cruised the U.S. Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the Bahamas and
the U.S. east coat before crossing the Atlantic to spend
years living aboard in the England and the Scandinavian
countries before returning stateside. Although he still has
and sails Aręte, now in his 80s, he makes his home in
rural New England after having sailed, lived, and explored
that great distant dream, unstopped by the mystery
that can never be fathomed…the source of it all.
In a later interview he says
that if the two books are read 100 years from now, Lila
will be regarded as the most important. If that is true, I
don't know, but the older sailor in me enjoyed the later sea
voyage as did the younger artist of my youth relish the
cross-country adventure.
Cruising Blues and Their Cure
by Robert Pirsig
(Esquire, 1977)
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