It’s the birthday of Robert Pirsig (books by this author), born in Minneapolis (1928). He’s the author of the cult classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974), a book that has sold more than 5 million copies, which is a lot for a book on philosophy. It’s an account of his road trip from Minnesota to California, and his quest to reconcile Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. The book begins:
“I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning. The wind, even at sixty miles an hour, is warm and humid. When it’s this hot and muggy at eight-thirty, I’m wondering what it’s going to be like in the afternoon. […] In the wind are pungent odors from the marshes by the road. We are in an area of the Central Plains filled with thousands of duck hunting sloughs, heading northwest from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas. […] I’m happy to be riding back into this country. It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that. Tensions disappear along old roads like this.”
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