Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
When I was a kid, I loved reading. I read biographies, history, science, whatever I could get my hands on. By high school reading was a chore and I hated it. The stuff I was being forced to read was just irrelevant. The Grapes of Wrath and Lord of the Flies were exceptions, and over the years I realized the material was fabulous, but the bored and disconnected way most of my teachers presented it made it seem like another exercise in making the bed and folding my clothes. Waiting for Godot saved my ass when my English teacher told me in May of my senior year that I would not graduate unless I absolutely crushed a report or did a treatment of Beckett’s masterpiece. I did, thanks in no small part to my completely ripping off Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Karn Evil Nine in the story I wrote as a counterpoint to Vladimir and Estragon’s search for Godot. Mrs. Godbold’s threat of graduation annihilation was the single greatest motivator I had received during my school career, so thanks for that.
Back then, the only book I read on my own was Robert Pirsig’s 1974 pseudo-biography Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I stole it from my brother because I thought it was about motorcycles. It wasn’t about motorcycles, but motorcycles played the role of technology and the coming struggle between man and machine. The book completely and totally blew my fifteen-year-old mind and changed my outlook on pretty much everything, even though in quite a few cases it took me years to acquire the wisdom to understand the concepts the book implanted in my head.
For about thirty years I’ve wanted to pay homage to Zen and the Art… by writing my own version of it, which I finally did (at least in my mind) with A Long Walk Home. Instead of motorcycles playing the role of technology, in my homage baseball plays the role of the pure essence of life. Reading Pirsig’s views on art, quality and relationships for the first time I realized that maybe I wasn’t as isolated and crazy as I thought I was. If you haven’t read Zen and the Art… I won’t spoil the ending, but Pirsig also illustrated the mind of the isolated individual more than anything I’ve ever encountered.
When I pitched A Long Walk Home, I used Zen and the Art… as my “similar books” example thinking it was a super-concise way of describing my work. The thing I didn’t consider is that a literary agent who is under forty likely has no clue about Zen and the Art… let alone the fact that it is the biggest selling philosophy book ever written (to date it has sold more than 5,000,000 copies). I took heart in the fact that Pirsig was rejected almost 150 times before someone understood what he was writing. Eventually I took advantage of the technology that Pirsig didn’t have, by-passed the gatekeepers to get the book in front of the public directly. The irony is not lost on me.
Robert Pirsig and his first book were my largest literary influence, period, and although I’d have a hard time sharpening Pirsig’s pencils, to play in the same arena as him is an amazing privilege.