Books: The Enormous Vrooom

(2 of 2)

Pirsig's Phaedrus was a lonely man who, despite an IQ of 170, had trouble with his studies. He began at 15 as a college freshman studying science, but he soon could not keep his ability to reason within any accepted academic context. From hypotheses he would get not proofs but only more hypotheses. Because his mind kept searching for an underlying universal principle, he switched to philosophy and eventually went to India to study oriental thought. Phaedrus-Pirsig never thought small. His aim was to do nothing less than revamp the whole scientific method that operated from the premise that the observer and what was observed must be separate reali ties.

For Phaedrus, East met West in a synthesis of Buddhism's ideas on the pursuit of excellence and those of the French mathematician-philosopher Jules Henri Poincare, who in Foundations of Science (1902) claimed that the underlying reality was not to be found in solid objects but in the harmonious order of the objects. Phaedrus called this unobservable order "Quality" and spent years trying to convince his teachers, and later his students, that it was the missing link that would close the subject-object gap and the schism between classic and romantic, between art and technology. Whether it was his method or the intense manner in which he went about his preaching, people thought Phaedrus was going a little crazy. Eventually, he accommodated them.

This ghostly Pirsig-past continues to haunt Pirsig-present as well as his son. There is a climactic moment when Pirsig thinks that he is again losing his grip and that Phaedrus may regain control. He decides to send the boy home by bus and check into a hospital. The boy refuses to go and begins to weep uncontrollably. Then, for the first time, father and son confront the painful truth about Phaedrus. The past and present come together, and Pirsig and Chris, who up to this point have seemed like subject and object, are united by what might be appropriately described as the underlying quality of familial love.

Greasy Hands. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an unforgettable trip. It accelerates from the befuddlements of transmission linkage through Pirsig's history of Western thought to the mysteries of divine madness with scarcely a wobble. The fact that much of Pirsig's torque-wrenched dissertation echoes the quandaries that some high-energy physicists have about the nature of matter is not of primary importance. What matters most is that he communicates how very much he cares about living as a whole man and how hard he has worked at it. Indeed, the special gift of the universal principle that Pirsig calls Quality is caring, even if one reaches for the heavens with grease on his hands.

R.Z. Sheppard