How Does Chris React to Hte Changes Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Remembering loved ones: Part of the fabric of life

When someone dies, where do they become?

Someone I know is grieving for a loved ane and the burden weighs deep, more and then as information technology's a reminder that the very nature of life itself is non only fleeting, but cheating.

We love others and what happens? They die. In that location'due south no way around information technology.

At times similar these I am reminded of the classic 1974 book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. This "philosophical novel" might have ended up every bit simply another i of those 1970s "new age" books, but the ideas in this i unfold in the form of a true story, which only concludes in a tragic death after the book was published.

What is "good"?

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an account of a 17-mean solar day motorbike trip Pirsig took with his 11-year-quondam son Chris. Pirsig was a professor of English and had studied philosophy at the University of Chicago. And so he did a lot of thinking — peradventure too much thinking.

Condensing information technology all down into just a few words, the book describes the author'southward struggle with an inability to answer one elementary question: What is good?

Is the quality of goodness objective — a "truth" that can be somehow verified and measured? Or is information technology subjective — an "in the moment" feeling of some kind? Is your motorcycle (a metaphor for your life) in melody considering it meets some preset mechanical specifications or because deep down inside yous simply know it?

He explores these issues during his trip with Chris. Along the manner we learn that a few years earlier, when Chris was a little boy, Pirsig got then entangled in this philosophical quagmire that he was hospitalized in a mental establishment. He was declared clinically insane past a courtroom and received weeks of electro-convulsive therapy to give him a "new personality." (This was in the early on 1960s.)

As the volume and motorcycle trip nears its cease, Pirsig'south "onetime personality" emerges again, but with a soundness of mind that resolves his disharmonize with clarity. That's when Chris bonds with his father more deeply and at present conspicuously understands that his dad was not insane. ("I knew it!" Chris says again and again and again).

The last line of the book is certainly uplifting:

We've won it. It's going to get amend now. You tin sort of tell these things.

I'll admit I've done a great disservice trying to sum upward this volume in just a few paragraphs, but there'southward a deeper story here. An epilogue in a later edition of Zen and the Art of Motorbike Maintenance tells some other story Pirsig could never take envisioned when his volume was offset published.

Ten years later: "Where did he become?"

Pirsig's afterword to the 1984 10th anniversary edition includes his reflections on how the book had been turned down by more than 100 publishers, yet ended upwardly becoming a best seller. Then he reveals this:

… this past 10 years has a very dark side: Chris is dead.

Recounting how Chris had been killed in a robbery at the age of 23, Pirsig begins thinking and rethinking in some all-too familiar ways:

I tend to be taken with philosophical questions, going over them and over them and over them again in loops that go circular and round and round until they either produce an answer or get and so repetitively locked on they become psychiatrically dangerous, and now the questions became obsessive: "Where did he become?"

Indeed, do existent people disappear? No, nix "real" disappears if the laws of physics hold true.

Well, if Chris wasn't real, was he somehow imaginary — existing just in other people's minds? Pirsig merely tin can't have that his son, who actually walked on this planet, could in any way be "unreal."

Then Pirsig realizes that "where did Chris go?" isn't at all the question he should actually be asking:

Before information technology could exist asked "Where did he go?" it must be asked "What is the 'he' that is gone?" At that place is an old cultural habit of thinking of people equally primarily something cloth, as flesh and claret. Equally long equally this idea held, at that place was no solution. The oxides of Chris's flesh and blood did, of course, get up the stack at the crematorium.

Just they weren't Chris.

What had to exist seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object just a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to information technology. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related u.s.a. in ways that neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of.

Yes, Chris is gone in a "real" sort of mode, but every bit a office of a larger "design," he is all the same with us. Pirsig says that you could call this design 1's soul, one'due south spirit, or by many other names across many other cultures throughout human history. True, death may rip a huge hole from the center of the pattern, but its tapestry remains.

Does any of this bring any comfort at all? To Pirsig it does. Equally he writes at the very end of the epilogue in this revised edition:

Although the names keep irresolute and the bodies keep changing, the larger blueprint that holds united states all together goes on and on.

In terms of this larger pattern the lines at the end of this book however stand.

We HAVE won information technology. Things ARE improve now. You can sort of tell these things.

Making "good time"

In the very early pages of Zen and the Fine art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig described what he wanted from that infamous motorcycle trip taken and then long ago:

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on "skillful" rather than on "fourth dimension."

I honestly tin't say I understand all the nuances of Robert Pirsig'southward ideas. Just if this lilliputian essay brings even a tiny bit of comfort to my friend, writing it was fourth dimension well spent — it was "practiced" time.

Yeah, yous can sort of tell these things.

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Source: https://medium.com/@rbloch/remembering-loved-ones-part-of-the-fabric-of-life-2457ef241b99

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