Published April 25, 2017
Robert M. Pirsig, author
of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” died at his home in South
Berwick, Maine on April 24.
The 88-year-old writer
had been in poor health, according to his publishing hosue, William Morrow.
The philosophical 1974
novel was inspired by a motorcycle trip Persig took with his young son in the
1960s and became a cultural touchstone that sold over five-million copies
worldwide after being rejected by over 100 publishers when he first shopped it
around.
Like a cult favorite from
the 1950s, Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," the book's path to the
best-seller list was long and unlikely. It began as an essay he wrote after he
and Chris rode from Minnesota to the Dakotas and grew to a manuscript of
hundreds of thousands of words.
After the entire industry
seemed to shun it, William Morrow took on the book, with editor James Landis
writing at the time that he found it "brilliant beyond belief."
Pirsig's novel was in
part an ode to the motorcycle and how he saw the world so viscerally traveling
on one, compared to the TV-like passivity of looking out at the window of a
car.
"Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance" ideally suited a generation's yearning for the
open road, quest for knowledge and skepticism of modern values, while also
telling a personal story about a father and son relationship and the author's
struggles with schizophrenia.
A world traveler and
former philosophy student, Pirsig would blend his life and learning, and East
and West, into what he called the Metaphysics of Quality.
"But some things are
better than others, that is, they have more quality," he wrote. "But
when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it
all goes poof! There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality
is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no
one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist at all.
But for all practical purposes it really does exist."
The book was praised as a
unique and masterful blend of narrative and philosophy and was compared to
"Moby Dick" by New Yorker critic George Steiner, who wrote that
Pirsig's story "lodges in the mind as few recent novels have."
Writing in The New York Times, Edward Abbey was unsure how to categorize the
book.
"Is 'Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance' a novel or an autobiography?" he wondered.
"In this case the distinction seems of no importance; maybe it never was.
Call the book, as Pirsig himself does, an inquiry. Therein lies its singular
energy and force."
Pirsig's response to his
unexpected success was to step away from it. He avoided interviews and took 17
years to complete "Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals," the sequel to his
best-seller.
"It is not good to
talk about Zen because Zen is nothingness," he told The Guardian in 2006.
"If you talk about it you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it
no one knows it is there."
A native of Minneapolis,
Pirsig was a prodigy who at age 9 scored 170 on an IQ test and six years later
graduated from high school. Army service in Korea at the end of World War II
exposed him to Eastern thought and culture and profoundly influenced him.
He studied philosophy at
the University of Minnesota, traveled to India and back in the states honed an
enigmatic teaching style at Montana State College and at the University of
Illinois, sometimes refusing to grade papers or asking students to grade each
other.
At the same time, he
suffered from anxiety so paralyzing that one day he was in a car with Chris and
lost his way, needing his son to guide him home.
"I could not sleep
and I could not stay awake," he told The Guardian. "I just sat there
cross-legged in the room for three days."
Pirsig is survived by his
wife, Wendy; son, Ted; daughter, Nell Peiken, and son-in-law, Matthew Peiken,
along with three grandchildren.
Chris was killed by a
mugger in 1979, and later editions of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance" would include an afterword about him. The author told The
Guardian his son had not cared for the book.
"He said, 'Dad, I
had a good time on that trip. It was all false,'" Pirsig explained.
"It threw him terribly. There is stuff I can't talk about still."
