Fanfictionnet Sons of Anarchy Tig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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Reading Robert Pirsig's description of a road trip today, i feels bereft. In his 1974 autobiographical novel Zen and the Fine art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he describes an unhurried step over two-lane roads and through thunderstorms that take the narrator and his companions by surprise every bit they ride through the North Dakota plains. They annals the miles in subtly varying marsh odors and in blackbirds spotted, rather than in coordinates ticked off. Nearly shocking, in that location is a kid on the back of one of the motorcycles. When was the concluding time you saw that? The travelers' exposure—to bodily take a chance, to all the unknowns of the road—is arresting to present-twenty-four hour period readers, specially if they don't ride motorcycles. And this exposure is somehow existential in its significance: Pirsig conveys the experience of being fully in the world, without the mediation of devices that filter reality, smoothing its crude edges for our psychic comfort.
If such experiences feel less available to us now, Pirsig would not be surprised. Already, in 1974, he offered this story as a meditation on a detail way of moving through the world, 1 that felt marked for extinction. The book, which uses the narrator'due south road trip with his son and two friends as a journey of inquiry into values, became a massive best seller, and in the decades since its publication has inspired millions to seek their ain accommodation with modernistic life, governed by neither a reflexive aversion to technology, nor a naive religion in information technology. At the heart of the story is the motorcycle itself, a 1966 Honda Super Hawk. Hondas began to sell widely in America in the 1960s, inaugurating an abiding fascination with Japanese design amidst American motorists, and the company'due south founder, Soichiro Honda, raised the idea of "quality" to a quasi-mystical status, coinciding with Pirsig's own efforts in Zen to articulate a "metaphysics of quality." Pirsig's writing conveys his loyalty to this car, a relationship of care extending over many years. I got to work on several Hondas of this vintage when I ran a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia. Compared to British bikes of the aforementioned era, the Hondas seemed more than refined. (My writing career grew out of these experiences—an effort to articulate the human element in mechanical work.)
In the first chapter, a disagreement develops between the narrator and his riding companions, John and Sylvia, over the question of motorcycle maintenance. Robert performs his own maintenance, while John and Sylvia insist on having a professional do information technology. This posture of non-interest, we soon learn, is a crucial element of their countercultural sensibility. They seek escape from "the whole organized chip" or "the system," as the couple puts information technology; technology is a death strength, and the point of hitting the road is to leave it behind. The solution, or rather evasion, that John and Sylvia hit on for managing their revulsion at applied science is to "Have it somewhere else. Don't accept it hither." The irony is they still find themselves entangled with The Motorcar—the ane they sit on.
Zen and the Fine art of Motorbike Maintenance
A narration of a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son, the volume becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions of how to alive. The narrator's human relationship with his son leads to a powerful self-reckoning; the craft of motorcycle maintenance leads to an austerely cute process for reconciling scientific discipline, religion, and humanism
Today, we often use "technology" to refer to systems whose inner workings are assiduously kept out of view, magical devices that offering no apparent friction betwixt the self and the earth, no need to principal the grubby details of their operation. The manufacture of our smartphones, the algorithms that guide our digital experiences from the cloud—information technology all takes place "somewhere else," just as John and Sylvia wished.
All the same lately nosotros have begun to realize that this very opacity has opened new avenues of surveillance and manipulation. Big Tech now orders everyday life more deeply than John and Sylvia imagined in their techno-dystopian nightmare. Today, a road trip to "get away from it all" would depend on GPS, and would prompt digital ads tailored to our destination. The whole excursion would be mined for behavioral information and used to nudge usa into profitable channels, likely without our fifty-fifty knowing it.
Nosotros don't know what Pirsig, who died in 2017, thought of these developments, as he refrained from most interviews subsequently publishing a second novel, Lila, in 1991. But his narrator has left us a manner out that can exist reclaimed past anyone venturesome enough to endeavour information technology: He patiently attends to his own motorbike, submits to its quirky mechanical needs and learns to understand information technology. His fashion of living with machines doesn't rely on the seductions of effortless convenience; it requires us to get our hands dirty, to be cocky-reliant. In Zen, we run into a man maintaining direct engagement with the world of material objects, and with it some measure of independence—both from the purveyors of magic and from cultural despair.
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Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/robert-pirsig-zen-art-motorcycle-maintenance-resonates-today-180975768/