Robert Pirsig dead at 88

Okay, he wrote about a BMW. And rode a Honda.
But what he wrote about in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance equally applies to riders of Nortons. Maybe more so.
When you work on your Norton, you work on yourself..... Again and again.

Here is a blurb about Robert Pirsig. And a link to a interesting podcast. He takes you on a tour of his shop at 33 minutes.
http://www.cbc.ca/books/2017/04/robert- ... at-88.html

Stephen Hill

sad news, i have a first edition hard back copy...every two or three years i read it again

It must be terrible karma to kick a guy when he's down and I freely admit that the book could easily be over my head, but I made three honest attempts to read "Zen" over the last 30 or 40 years and kept coming to the same conclusion, that he is way over thinking it.

Me too.

Pirsig's younger son, not the one on the bike, lives down the road from me. Friendly guy with a lovely woman, I only recently made the connection at a mutual friends' super bowl party this winter.

Though both father and son were/are Buddhists, they had not spoken in over 30 years. I did not ask why. Things that make ya go hmmmm....

"Motorcycle Maintenance" was less about that craft than about one man's struggle with sanity. Pirsig uses motorcycle maintenance as a metaphor for soul maintenance. A good read.

and a sadder note about a father and his son.

When riding a long way (especially back in the day) a person tends to dwell on the machine and the mind is (was) constantly thinking about all the things that could go wrong, but when you finally get to a destination, you must consider all the things that had to go right to get that far with no issues. Then, it becomes another type of concentration to make sure the machine is still in one piece and functioning as designed so the journey can continue. A person's mental state is much the same, constantly considering what could go wrong and not realizing until later what went right. Being able to subjugate the negative and accentuate the positive is what keeps us sane, and this, to me, was the lesson of "Zen". The second book was not nearly as good and I assume it was because Pirsig was a bit closer to sanity by that time. R.I.P.