A Beautiful Book That Changed My Life

A Slowly Burning Torch of a Philosophy Book

I grew up in the 1970’s in the town of Kristianstad in Southern Sweden. Life in those days was quite different from how it is today, without the Internet. We had limited access to all the ideas of philosophy and modern thought that we now access via computers. Already in those days I was an avid reader, and I took an interest in philosophy, psychology, leadership, religion, and other areas that were hot at the time. Technology was in those days still a remote subject. Computers were the tools big companies used to send bills and handle payrolls, not something ordinary people had in their homes and media was represented by newspapers, radio, and television.

I sometimes went to the local bookshop to browse the shelves for interesting titles, especially in the English section. I had at a young age already started to read books in English, because I thought it would be interesting to see if I would understand them, using the English I’d learned at school and the English spoken on television and in cinemas to guide me. It worked well enough to wet my appetite for more English books and I realised that many more books were published in English than in my native Swedish.

One day a book with the alluring title “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” grabbed my attention. Somehow the title rang a bell. I must have heard about it somewhere, and I read the blurb. We had studied Zen at school and the connection between religion and the mundane task of maintaining motorcycles seemed thrilling.

Over the years I have read the paperback so many times it has fallen apart, and I had to throw it away and buy another. It is still one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read, and I realise that I’m in good company, because it is the best-selling philosophy book of all time. Still, the author, Robert M Pirsig, had to send it to 121 publishers before he found one that wanted to publish it and the publisher who did never thought he would make any money from it.

To me it has been a strong guiding light, one that has stood the test of time. I have probably read it ten times and I am a person who does not often re-read entire books. I usually use non-fiction books as reference, to look up information when I write my own books, but I very seldom read a book a second time.

A Quest for Truth, Quality, and Beauty

“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” relates a motorcycle journey through the North-West of the United States. The narrator is a philosophy teacher, whom we only get to know as Phaedrus, who travels with his friends John and Sylvia Sutherland, and his son Chris. Through the book the narrator relates stories that he calls Chautauquas. He relates his ideas on philosophy and life in general against the background of the motorcycle journey.

Phaedrus tries to merge two different ways of understanding the world and he tries to lead a life where he balances the two philosophies. One is the romantic way of seeing the world, represented by John and Sylvia. John drives a new expensive motorcycle, and he does not want to learn how the motorcycle works. Instead, he gets angry when something goes wrong and leaves it to professional mechanics to maintain and repair it.

Phaedrus drives an older motorcycle with which he has developed a type of symbiosis. He listens intently to every sound and tries to understand, adjust, and repair it himself. He has a classical approach to motorcycle maintenance, that of studying the machine, learning how it works, and applying his knowledge not only to repair and maintain, but also to make it run smoother.

Through his efforts he tries to define quality. He uses the word “gumption” to explain his approach of acute observation and readiness to solve problems.

He is, however, not content with applying the classical mind-set. He tries to merge the classical with the romantic, to also see the wondrous nature in the things in life that we cannot grasp through observation and reasoning. As I understand it, he tries to take in the full experience of human existence and not be limited by the partial views offered through the romantic or the classical way of approaching life.

Through this approach he hopes to experience a full life, and find deeper truths, real beauty, and the good aspects of life, not clouded by the limitations of the human mind.

That Way Madness Lies

Instead of finding truth Phaedrus goes insane and it is only towards the end of the book that Phaedrus once more regains his strong and independent personality.

The Greatness of a Great Book

To me, the greatness of the book lies in how the author in Chautauquas and stories along the way captures the nature of human existence and discusses philosophy through observations of little things. At the same time the reader understands that what is being discussed is something much larger. He writes about writing, motorcycle maintenance, and driving through a varying landscape, but the reader gradually realises that he is writing about life itself and the challenges to understand the world that we all go through on our journey from the cradle to the grave.

Mats is the author of five internationally published books on technology development, sustainability, and global change. He focuses on the large-scale challenges that modern society is facing, such as the change to electromobility, the circular economy, digitisation, and energy efficiency. His latest book is “The Blind Guardians of Ignorance — Covid -19, Sustainability, and Our Vulnerable Future” from 2020 and the first one of these was “Global Energy Transformation,” published in 2009.