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honkietonk 's review for:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
by Robert M. Pirsig
I love and hate this book.
I think that it's an incredibly important thing to truly commit philosophically to what you love. I think we don't do that enough in real life, that we could learn from how truly and deeply and wholly he loves everything involving motorcycling. He turns a routine, boring, mundane job of changing the oil into something fascinating and beautiful. We could all use a little more of that.
I do not like how gravely he speaks about philosophy. I hate it. He talks about Phaedrus, like he's writing the book with Phaedrus holding a knife to his neck. That sounds dramatic but he actually says something like "I truly fear Phaedrus' knife..." which evokes imagery of a crappy slasher movie. He's using the knife as imagery to cut up and compartmentalize his life and how we decide our little experience of life is the world entire, but goddamn...don't be so serious about ideas and mental framing, it makes me want to laugh and cry in exasperation. He's trying so hard to be taken seriously that it falls laughably short, and his writing loses a lot of its power due to the graveness in tone. It's like you're being taught the Allegory of the Cave by Kristin Stewart.
I think that it's an incredibly important thing to truly commit philosophically to what you love. I think we don't do that enough in real life, that we could learn from how truly and deeply and wholly he loves everything involving motorcycling. He turns a routine, boring, mundane job of changing the oil into something fascinating and beautiful. We could all use a little more of that.
I do not like how gravely he speaks about philosophy. I hate it. He talks about Phaedrus, like he's writing the book with Phaedrus holding a knife to his neck. That sounds dramatic but he actually says something like "I truly fear Phaedrus' knife..." which evokes imagery of a crappy slasher movie. He's using the knife as imagery to cut up and compartmentalize his life and how we decide our little experience of life is the world entire, but goddamn...don't be so serious about ideas and mental framing, it makes me want to laugh and cry in exasperation. He's trying so hard to be taken seriously that it falls laughably short, and his writing loses a lot of its power due to the graveness in tone. It's like you're being taught the Allegory of the Cave by Kristin Stewart.