Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenace

Dear Chris,

Like you, I have been torn between reflecting on life in this blog and living it. Usually recording such things is completely separate from the living of life, but I like to hope that by encoding this record in a letter open to the world, it somehow counts as living life, or at least eventually furthering the living of life. I should be updating daily, with little snippets of ideas. No matter now. I can promise to start tomorrow, but it is hard to be kept to such a promise. We shall see.

I just finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book I have been meaning to read and finally gained the opportunity to when Joe checked it out from the library and I stole it from him. He has On the Road, so I don't feel bad I stole it.

This book is as much about philosophy as it is about motorcycles, and it was really quite interesting. What I'd like to focus on, though, is a few passages that when I read them I jumped and said, "This is what I was talking about! Right here. This is what I meant." Every major epiphany I had last semester was here! Of course, had I read this book cold a year ago, I would have simply glossed over such things. That's why we have to live and discover them ourselves. But it's good to have some positive feedback.

Page 204 (in my edition, a black-covered utilitarian Yale copy)
"Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed."

Page 209
"Cromwell's statement, 'No one ever travels so high as he who knows not where he is going.' applies here."


Page 291
"It was beautiful because the people who worked on it had a way of looking at things that made them do it right unselfconsciously."

Page 357
"Or if he takes whatever dull job he's stuck with-and they are all, sooner or later, dull-and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he's likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because the Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn't think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going."

Page 377
"Arete implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency-or rather a much high idea of efficiency, and inefficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself."

It's past my bedtime, so I'm going to let these sit in cyberspace for the world to see and then edit them with my thoughts.

I will continue to write, even if my writings become unrequited.

Love,

Alan