Mark Richardson checks the map in Montana while following the Zen Route.The Globe and Mail
For 50 years, people have been travelling the Zen Route across America, most for a day or two at a time, some for the full two weeks from Minneapolis to San Francisco. This is the road less travelled across the Midwest that follows the 1968 motorcycle ride of Robert Pirsig and his 11-year-old son Chris, made famous in Pirsig’s seminal book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
That book was published in 1974 and was an immediate hit, quickly becoming the best-selling philosophy book of all time, selling more than five million copies and translated into more than two dozen languages. The people who follow its route, usually on motorcycles but also in anything that travels on a road, are known as Pirsig Pilgrims, and 20 years ago, I became one of them. Next month, I will be again.
Pirsig died in 2017 at his home in Maine, but he was born in Minneapolis and was living there when he wrote his famous book. That’s where the various Pilgrims and members of the Robert Pirsig Association will meet over the weekend of July 6 to reflect on the influence of the book on their lives. For me, it was profound, though I didn’t really realize it at the time.
Like many others, it took me a while to read the book. I first heard of it as a teenager and gave it a try then, but it wasn’t really about motorcycles and was a tough read. I read maybe 50 pages. A few years later, I tried it again and made it perhaps 100 pages in, before bumping up against references to ancient philosophers and drifting to something more accessible. Then I gave it a try as a summer cottage read and, this time, pressed through to the end. When I reached the final page, lying in a hammock on my 41st birthday, I thought to myself, “Ah – so that’s what he’s saying!” Without pause, I turned back to the first page and read it through again, now understanding its context and absorbing every word.
(above) Mark Richardson changes the oil on his Suzuki DR600 outside his motel room in Lemmon, S.D. (Below) Mark Richardson rides to Minneapolis on his Suzuki DR600.
The Globe and Mail
It’s a book that tries to answer the question of “What is quality?” What makes something good, or better, and how can we incorporate that into our own lives? It uses the framework of a motorcycle road trip on an underpowered Honda Super Hawk to weigh up the practical advice of the ancient Greeks against the more spiritual advice of the Buddha and Zen thought. But it can be tricky because the narrator of the story, who is the father riding the bike with his young son on the pillion, keeps referring to a mysterious man named Phaedrus, who occasionally cuts in as an alternative narrator.
The story itself is mostly true and actually happened, but the answer to “What is quality?” is not so straightforward as you may think, and especially not to Pirsig, who was a tortured genius. Years before his motorcycle journey, it literally drove him insane, and in 1961, after chasing his first wife, Nancy, through their house and holding a gun to her head, he was finally committed to a mental hospital. Over the next couple of years, he was given 28 applications of experimental electroshock therapy that effectively erased his former personality. It was that person the book’s chief narrator calls Phaedrus – the original father. “A whole personality had been liquidated without a trace in a technologically faultless act that has defined our relationship ever since,” wrote the narrator in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. “I have never met him. Never will.”
So there’s a lot going on in this book. The brand of philosophy that Pirsig espoused, and which is expanded upon in his later book, Lila, is known as the Metaphysics of Quality, and PhDs have been earned on its study. Guidebooks have been published, and conferences held.
For me in 2004, however, I just wanted a good road trip to take a break from life for a while, and so much the better if something of quality should rub off on me along the way. I ended up writing a book about my journey and the author and his work, which I intended as a primer to help explain it to non-philosophers like myself.
Author Robert Pirsig and his son Chris on their Honda Super Hawk at a stop in North Dakota during their trip in 1968.Supplied
Pirsig’s unusual title is itself a blend of art and science, with the motorcycle maintenance as a metaphor for the practical side of life. Pirsig was critical of mechanics who’d damaged his bike by hurrying through its routine maintenance and preferred to work on it himself, and he was regularly stopping to change the oil, adjust the points and tappets, and fiddle with the carburetor jets. His patient work paid off and his motorcycle was a better machine for it. More recently, he helped in its restoration, and after his death, his second wife and widow, Wendy, donated it to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, together with some paraphernalia from the trip and an original manuscript of the book; its display was opened to the public at the museum in Washington this April.
The Zen Route heads west from Minnesota’s Twin Cities across the Dakota prairie, up into the mountains near Yellowstone National Park, pauses for a while at Bozeman, Mont., then continues west through Idaho and Oregon before reaching California and ending in a literary show-down on the coast a few hours north of San Francisco, where Phaedrus finally emerges in the narrator’s head to reclaim his son. It travels through small-town America and avoids tourist traps like Mount Rushmore, though it does visit the beautiful Crater Lake in Oregon. Its sections of travelogue are gorgeous in their description, and the road’s comparative isolation means not much has changed over the years. Most of the Pilgrims who embark on the journey next month will only do so for a few days, though some plan to travel the entire 3,000 kilometres. I’ll just stay with it for the first day’s ride, turning back for home from Oakes, N.D., with my wife on our 30th wedding anniversary.
Pirsig, his son and John Sutherland, who travelled with them for the first half of the trip to Bozeman, Mont.Supplied
When I made the long journey from Toronto in 2004, I rode my Suzuki DR600, a dual-purpose motorcycle that was old even then, and I took it for its simplicity. It’s a single-cylinder “thumper” motorcycle with a carburetor and a kick starter, and it broke down on me a few times along the way. Even so, I made it to the other end, fixed it up and rode it home, where it’s still in my garage. This time, I’ll be riding a much more comfortable Honda Gold Wing, which my wife insisted on if she was to come along too. Can’t say as I blame her.
At its core, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance states that if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Don’t allow the distractions of modern life to pull you away from ensuring that a task is completed to its best potential – and this was published 50 years ago, before cellphones and social media. To my mind, its lesson is even more relevant today than it was then. I hope that next month, perhaps some of its quality will rub off on me once again.
Mark Richardson is the author of Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Knopf, 2008)
For more information on the Robert Pirsig Association, and the gathering and ride in July that is free for participants, go to robertpirsig.org.
Mark Richardson