LILA: AN INQUIRY INTO MORALS -- Robert M. Pirsig

The first thing I learned from Robert Pirsig was that I'm a romantic. A mildly unsettling discovery as I started reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values shortly after the paperback edition came out inthe mid-'70s. I had assumed romantics were dreamy sappy sorts who loved show tunes and craved syrup on their stories. Couldn't be me, the cynical Army vet, digger of Mailer, Jones, the Dead and the Stones. It wasn't until later, postPirsig, that I read somewhere cynics are disenchanted romantics, and it resonated.

But I wasn't there yet when I started Zen. My “cynicism” was more unconscious affectation than true, akin to whistling in the dark with a secret faith in the happy ending. I was a romantic in disguise from myself.

Pirsig's skill at leading me to this reluctant discovery was masterful. It started with the title. For me, Zen Buddhism was a one-hand-clapping fad, the kind of esoteria that enabled hipsters to sneer at the Mr. Joneses for not knowing what was happening. I identified with Mr. Jones. But paired with something so two-handed as mechanics, and with the ingenious embellishment of the pragmatic with “art,” the book felt more than accessible. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceintrigued me. It didn't hurt that mainstream critics raved about Zen, lauding it as, in one review, “profoundly important, disturbing, deeply moving, full of insights, a wonderful book."

Such endorsements on top of a sly title sold me the book. Pirsig's voice did the rest.

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