Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance…
Jan. 4th, 2011 04:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
michiexile…or How Robert M. Pirsig broke my brain…
…or Those Books that alter your reality while you read them…
I finally picked up ZAMM a few weeks back. Insisted we buy the bargain books version at Borders in spite of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
amerikabrev trying to temper my shopping lusts. And then I devoured the book. Not satisfied with just reading the book, I then constructed a Google Map with the path travelled, and immediately ordered Lila from Amazon.
I have now, just now in fact, read through Lila as well. I'm less impressed and less moved by it than I was by ZAMM — to a large extent because it reads more like a tome of philosophy, and less like ZAMM did: longer quotes from literature, and more and larger chunks of solid philosophizing trying to apply insights from the previous book to moral philosophy. This makes it less inspiring since it's less of discovering thoughts and more of applying them.
However, I did notice as I read these similarities to other books I've read. Pirsig does the same (kinda backhanded) trick that Ayn Rand does in embedding his philosophy into novels. And at least ZAMM had the same reality-altering effects on me (though softer) that the Illuminatus! trilogy had on my first read through. (Pehr, Jon, you both probably remember that Krakow trip and my sudden descent into numerology?)
Just as with Rand and just as with Illuminatus! though, I'm not sure I buy it. Not when I come out of the reading trance again. Part of it is that I'm just not all that interested in metaphysics — I have a very materialistic outlook, and don't view the Hunt For The Ultimate Buildingblocks as all that relevant to my current life. As such, Pirsig's “Everything is just reified Quality” becomes a neat but irrelevant thesis in much the same way that most religions do. The parts I enjoyed — in both books, actually — are the ones where Pirsig is commenting on Academia, and on Didactics, while the increasingly dense ruminations on the defintiion and preponderance of Quality felt, well, neat but at times rather academic.
My fault, almost certainly, is to read it in my 30s and not in my teens, when I was moldable. Just like with Rand, I came too late to the party to be utterly consumed at any length by the texts…
…or Those Books that alter your reality while you read them…
I finally picked up ZAMM a few weeks back. Insisted we buy the bargain books version at Borders in spite of
amerikabrev trying to temper my shopping lusts. And then I devoured the book. Not satisfied with just reading the book, I then constructed a Google Map with the path travelled, and immediately ordered Lila from Amazon.I have now, just now in fact, read through Lila as well. I'm less impressed and less moved by it than I was by ZAMM — to a large extent because it reads more like a tome of philosophy, and less like ZAMM did: longer quotes from literature, and more and larger chunks of solid philosophizing trying to apply insights from the previous book to moral philosophy. This makes it less inspiring since it's less of discovering thoughts and more of applying them.
However, I did notice as I read these similarities to other books I've read. Pirsig does the same (kinda backhanded) trick that Ayn Rand does in embedding his philosophy into novels. And at least ZAMM had the same reality-altering effects on me (though softer) that the Illuminatus! trilogy had on my first read through. (Pehr, Jon, you both probably remember that Krakow trip and my sudden descent into numerology?)
Just as with Rand and just as with Illuminatus! though, I'm not sure I buy it. Not when I come out of the reading trance again. Part of it is that I'm just not all that interested in metaphysics — I have a very materialistic outlook, and don't view the Hunt For The Ultimate Buildingblocks as all that relevant to my current life. As such, Pirsig's “Everything is just reified Quality” becomes a neat but irrelevant thesis in much the same way that most religions do. The parts I enjoyed — in both books, actually — are the ones where Pirsig is commenting on Academia, and on Didactics, while the increasingly dense ruminations on the defintiion and preponderance of Quality felt, well, neat but at times rather academic.
My fault, almost certainly, is to read it in my 30s and not in my teens, when I was moldable. Just like with Rand, I came too late to the party to be utterly consumed at any length by the texts…
