Dear X: I just finished a sad and strange book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig. The sadness is only in part due to the death of Pirsig's son Chris, which is covered in the last pages of the book. I feel that underneath all the author's spiritual and intellectual wrestling with life and death, truth, subject/object, Quality, and so on, there is from the beginning of the book a melancholy, an awareness that he will never come to the kind of certain or reassuring conclusions about human existence that he seeks. Adding to the melancholy is the realization that the journey toward truth or consciousness is so excruciatingly solitary: "And what is good, Phaedrus,/ And what is not good---/ Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?" We are on our own when we set out on the raft of self to explore the world. Philosophy is a lonely journey, even if one is with a son or wife or friends, and it also likely a journey with uncertain rewards and an uncertain end.
I feel Pirsig's sadness, but I don't share his tenacious attitude toward philosophy. His relentless pursuit of Quality finally alienates me from him and his book. What kept me reading is the genuineness of his search. Perhaps I am seeing the book too simplistically, but the specifics of his philosophic quest do not seem that profound. His argument about the need to do away with the split between subject and object is an old one and seems moot to this reader. The problem is that, in reality, whether we live in the Zen East or the Greek West, there will always be that subject/object split, except for a wondrous moment now and then brought on by the grace of God and/or meditation and/or pure chance. What appeals to me, then, is not the actual philosophy, but Pirsig's sad, humane attitude toward his son, toward life, toward himself, toward philosophy, toward the truth. He has such respect for life, even though it is so obvious that he will never be able to p...