In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, two main themes dominate everything else: Quality and insanity. In Lila, the same two themes are also the most prominent topics discussed. As it turns out the two topics are indivisible. In Zen, the three main characters, are a narrator, (who is unnamed, but from the autobiographical outlook is assumed to be the author), his eleven year old son and travelling companion, Chris and a ghost named Phædrus. On the most basic level the book is about father and son travelling together on a motorcycle across the Great Divide, from the East to the West, following the route of the old pioneers. Through the course of the book the reader learns that Phædrus and the narrator are one and the same, the division of one person into two happening when Phædrus, some years earlier goes insane and is put through electroshock treatment. Having lost his mind once, he is very much afraid he may lose it again, so he stays clear of the dangerous field of abstractions, "the high country of the mind" where Phædrus had lost his footing. He becomes so obsessed with sanity, that it starts taking up all of his time and the whole of his mind, so on the most private level, his own life, he misses out completely. Beverly Gross, in her article "'A Mind Divided Against Itself': Madness in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" says: "So intent is he on submerging Phædrus that he has become a shell," 1 and she is quite right. The old self, Phædrus, had spent his life searching for the true meaning of Quality and his search-his manic pursuit, rather-is what costed him his sanity in the first place.
His second book, Lila, also dealing with the same two themes, continues the discussion on quality where it left off in Zen. Here he is also travelling, this time alone on a boat, sailing down the Hudson river on his way to New York and from there to Florida. Actually, he does not travel completely alone. When the book begins, he has "accidentally" picked up a passenger, a bar lady called Lila (hence the name). As for the former topic, Quality, he now calls it the Metaphysics of Quality in which he replaces the former basic division of classic vs. romantic with static quality vs. dynamic quality. Having come up with the new division it makes him able to view his insanity-or sanity for that matter-in a new light. It seems to help him understand why he had gone crazy all those years ago. To the reader it brings out different and very unusual aspects of insanity hardly ever considered before and within the philosophy of insanity they make considerable sense although it is dubious that Phædrus's reasonings may be applicable to all cases of mental disorders.
Why does Phædrus go insane? The first reason is that the "thin air of uncertainty in the high country of the mind" was a bit too hard on him. Having reached the top of the mountain he had nothing to hold on to up there and so eventually he had to fall. The second reason explaining his insanity is that what he was really doing all these years when he was climbing his "spiritual mountain", he was undermining the foundations of reality, the very foundations of his own existence. As it happens, Quality is what saves him from losing his mind again just as it was quality that caused him to lose it in the first place, and it saves him through his son. Chris is the narrator's travelling companion on his journey across the States and Chris, it turns out, is having some rather serious mental problems. The reader understands that it is his father's task to help him with these problems. The narrator, however, does not understand what causes the problem, has no idea what to do about them and therefore avoids doing anything. Besides, he has enough problems of his own. Only very close to the end of the book does he realise that what Chris needs and what he himself needs is the same thing: for the father to become whole again. Thus the "restoration of the Phædrus in himself that the narrator has squelched" (Gross, 211) is the solution for father and son both individually and together. It is the only quality thing to do. Beverly Gross deals with exactly this theme in her article and she brings the message of Zen down to one sentence:
The center of meaning of the book has to do with the necessity of synthesizing the normal, everyday, functioning self with the person given to extremes, excesses, dizzying heights, obsessions-our crazy self with our sane self, the greatness in us with our ordinariness. (201)
There is a distinct contrasts between Zen and Lila. Where Zen is aggressive, Lila is passive, the change of mood signified beautifully by a motorcycle in one and a sailing boat in the other. The modes of transport mirror the change in the narrator himself. First he rides a motorbike across the Great Divide, on his way to the West Coast. The motorcycle symbolises aggressiveness and freedom of the spirit and is therefore a fitting image for a man who has not quite accepted his fate in life. Later he sails on a small boat down the Hudson river and its canals en route to New York, following the stream and letting the current decide his course. It is total acceptence; a passive "sailing-through-life" attitude he portrays here. All fighting is long done with, what remains is more or less just to keep himself going. Yet despite the acceptence and having become so used to "this dream called sanity he doesn't even think about it anymore", 2 a slight feeling of depression is present. However, the depression is not a problem anymore, no fits of anxiety, no desperation, just dull conformity-his mental state is perfectly balanced. Zen, on the other hand, written at a more fragile time in his life, shows a person whose constant companion is uncertainty and fear of his unbalanced state of mind. The overall effect, going from one book to the other in chronological order, is double-sided: on one side it presents a person who has in the intermediate years gained control over his insanity and has no doubt as to who he is but on the other side it is clear that something has been lost in the process. The fire, the passion, the sense of urgency, which gives life to Zen, is gone in Lila.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is about a man trying very hard to neutralize his past self so his present self can be free. Very early on in the book, the reader learns that a few years previous to the journey described in the book, the narrator has gone insane, been removed from society by court order, committed to a mental hospital where he stays for two years and goes through a series of electro-shock treatments, which completely alters his personality. It also erases his memory, although a fragment of it gradually comes back to him. So at the beginning of the book there is a person, the narrator, who used to be somebody else than he is presently. The narrator calls his former self Phædrus and always refers to him in the third person, as if he were another person, which he basically is. The narrator does not want to have anything to do with his earlier self, wants him to remain dead and forgotten and explains to the reader that the purpose of the journey he is taking is partly to go through the past in order to discard it so he can bury his past self forever. "... ghosts appear when someone has not been buried right", according to Chris's Indian friend, and the narrator remembers those words because that is precisely what happens to himself. Of course the old Phædrus is gone, erased from the narrator's consciousness and so he should not have to worry too much about him. The trouble is that during the journey, Phædrus starts slowly but gradually waking up again. When, during the trip, they reach places where Phædrus used to live and work, the narrator discovers he has memories of them. He finds these fragmented memories disturbing and when he starts having strange symbolical dreams involving Chris and Phædrus, he really becomes frightened. Especially because he apparently talks in his sleep, saying strange things to Chris in Phædrus's voice. What is going on, Gross points out, is that "... his feeling is that Phædrus, who had to be destroyed because he went crazy, is coming back to supplant him. The narrator is terrified of the resurgence of Phædrus, which he takes to mean the return of insanity." (201) That time when he goes hiking with Chris, he has one of these dreams, in which he tells Chris he will "meet him at the top of the mountain". The narrator does not know he talks in his sleep until Chris tells him. At that point he almost panics for he becomes conscious of Phædrus waiting for him at the mountaintop. So he hurries back, wanting to get off the mountain, way down, as far down as he can, away from the threatening ghost. He finds security in staying as close to the ground as he possibly can; it keeps him out of the areas where Phædrus had lost his mind.
This need to stick to practical, everyday things, Gross says, signals something more than a little disturbing, There is more than a particularizing intelligence at work here: there are signs of something made increasingly manifest to us as the book develops-of a mind that must take refuge in pragmatic discourse for fear of lofting and losing itself. (203) What exactly causes Phædrus's madness? In Zen he spends a considerable amount of time pondering on possible definition explaining what (in)sanity basically is and in Lila he is still at it. From what he says there are two main reasons for Phædrus's losing hold on reality. Firstly, it seems to be his intelligence that is his undoing, or to quote Beverly Gross:
That he flunked out of college at seventeen for getting too absorbed in the question of the formulation of hypotheses foreshadows how at an older age he flunks out of reality for getting too absorbed in the question of Quality. Phædrus's genius is his undoing-that single-minded devotion to rationality that can put him out of touch, outside the 'mythos', out of commission, out of his mind. (204)
What happens to the old Phædrus is that he becomes obsessed with quality and spends years in trying to define it which is virtually impossible. When he becomes aware of his own inability to define quality to his satisfaction, it turns into an obsession since "For Phædrus, failure to understand something created tremendous interest...". 3 Leaving quality undefined was something he simply could not do because that meant he did not understand it. So he spends a great part of his life pursuing that one thing until he loses himself in abstractions. He, or rather his mind travels so far into the unknown that he loses hold of reality and goes out of his mind. He talks about the "high country of the mind" where at the uppermost reaches are the most "abstract considerations of all":
Few people travel there .... In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of questions asked, and to the answers proposed to these questions. The sweep goes on and on and on so obviously much further than the mind can grasp one hesitates even to go near for fear of getting lost in them and never finding one's way out. (Zen, 111)
Phædrus, who never spooked at anything, went all the way to the top, found what he wanted and then fell all the way down into the lunatic asylum. The present narrator wants to avoid falling as Phædrus did, and therefore keeps his safety by sticking to practical down-to-earth activities. While climbing the mountain with Chris, the words in his dream: "I'll meet you at the top of the mountain", coupled with the occasional rockslide, the narrator becomes afraid of the possibility of meeting Phædrus at the top; namely that he will go crazy again. He has been telling Chris about rockslides and avalanches and that some people who were caught in one and lie buried underneath it. Suddenly, he gets an eerie feeling from the whole thing; he "remembers" how
... the slippage that Phædrus had felt earlier the internal parting of his mind, suddenly gathered momentum, as do the rocks at the top of the mountain. Before he could stop it, the sudden accumulated mass of awareness began to grow and grow into and avalanche of thought and awareness out of control .... It all gave way from under him. (Zen, 228)
The top of the mountain is a dangerous place to be; there is nothing to hold on to and if one rock slips, the only way is down.
Secondly, during his quest for Quality, he comes up with the theory that Western world is dualistic in nature. There are two kinds of people, classically minded and romantically minded. The twain never meet and have nothing in common except Quality. Phædrus discovers that everybody knows Quality exists, nevertheless, there is such a disagreement about it, i.e. where and what it is exactly. Classic understanding sees Quality in underlying form, romantic understanding sees it in immediate appearance. One side finds Quality in knowledge, the other finds it in the instant, the unconscious awareness of the here and now. As he develops this theory, he comes up with the image of the train of knowledge, a train of consciousness as a symbol for society. The train-the engine and all the boxcars-is classic knowledge. There is no romantic knowledge anywhere in it. But, he says, "... so far the definition of the train is static [my emphasis] and purposeless", and "A train really isn't a train if it can't go anywhere." (Zen, 254) So romantic quality, the leading edge of the train, takes it along the track of Quality, the only track it can follow. He explains romantic reality as "the cutting edge of experience", and that "Traditional knowledge is only the collective memory of where that leading edge has been." (Zen, 254) The train and all its boxcars is the mythos-the accepted reality of Western culture. It has been developing through a millennium of years and to reject it is to become insane: "What is outside the train, to either side-that is the terra incognita of the insane", and "To go outside the mythos is to become insane..." (Zen, 316-17) Phædrus believed "... that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos" (Zen, 317), so, naturally, this is what he did.
Later, in another book called Lila, the same narrator-this time calling himself Phædrus-abandons the classic-romantic split as his basis for dividing Quality. As he says, "... In any hierarchy of metaphysical classification the most important division is the first one, for this division dominates everything beneath it. If this first division is bad there is no way you can ever build a really good system of classification around it." (Lila, 110) The classic-romantic division was the best he could do at the time but proved to be inefficient, since "the fact that Quality was the best way of uniting the two was no guarantee that the reverse was true-that the classic-romantic split was the best way of dividing Quality."(Lila, 112)
Anthropology opens up new dimensions in his Metaphysics of Quality and through it he finds the basic division he had been looking for. In a book by anthropologist Ruth Benedict, he reads an anecdote about a Pueblo Indian who lived in Zuñi, New Mexico. This Indian rebelled against the priests of his tribe, was branded a witch and punished severely for it and the whole tribe rejected him. Later he returns to the tribe and eventually becomes the governor of his tribe. What interested Phædrus about this particular story was this: why did a community which had already made an outcast of this man, later accept him to the degree that they made him their governor? His answer is that on the cultural level there exist two kinds of good and evil: Static good and Dynamic good. The static quality is that which makes up society; accepted values and moral laws making up the whole pattern of the existing culture. The Zuñi priests represented the static values. Then there is Dynamic good, that which is outside any culture and cannot be contained in it because it is the changing force. "Custom cannot change custom" (Lila, 117), the change has to come from outside. That is exactly what the Zuñi Indian, the witch, did: he caused the static patterns of his culture to change, that is why they took him back.
From this anecdote Phædrus felt confident he had found the ground on which he could explain his Metaphysics of Quality. Everything he now says about the static and the Dynamic division is reminiscent of what he says about the classical and romantic. In Lila he says: "Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, conpletely simple and always new", and "Static quality, the moral force of the priests, emerges in the wake of Dynamic Quality." (Lila, 119) He is saying exactly the same thing, but instead of classic knowledge there is static quality. Instead of romantic knowledge there is Dynamic quality. The suggestion made earlier that the old Phædrus had destroyed his own reality holds very well inside he Metaphysics of Quality:
Life can't exist on Dynamic Quality alone. It has no staying power. To cling to Dynamic Quality alone apart from any static patterns is to cling to chaos .... Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive, .... But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from degeneration. (Lila, 124)
The mistake he makes in Zen, the mistake the old Phædrus makes and drives him out of his mind, is that he does not see quality in the train of consciousness, the mythos, the static moral patterns. He sees Quality as being only outside the train, in the Dynamic patterns, and if he wants to understand Quality he will have to step off the train and get lost in no-mans-land. Later, when he regains his sanity, he makes sure he stays inside the mythos and tries not to go too close to the edge. That is when he becomes stuck and just as the other extreme was deadly for him, so is this one. So he discovers that a little bit of both is really what he needs and as it happens he turns out to be the link between Quality and insanity. He has only considered quality in dynamic things and automatically believes society bad for wanting to oppose any changes proposed, i.e. that static morality patterns has not quality. The two forces are, at the same time, both good and evil. On their own they are bad, for the reasons already enumerated above. Working together, they are good. However, it is a continual fighting process, for the two sides of reality are constantly in opposition to each other. Who has ever heard of a peaceful social change? A tribe can change its values only person by person and someone has to be first. Whoever is first obviously is going to be in conflict with everybody else. (Lila, 118) The reason for his falling off the end of the empirical world is that he rejected the static-the mythos-and embraced the Dynamic. He even says so himself in Lila: "In the past Phædrus's own radical bias caused him to think of Dynamic Quality alone and neglect static patterns of quality ...." (Lila, 124)
Gross's argument is that the narrator is making a terrible mistake when he considers life without Phædrus possible. Submerging Phædrus is precisely what he should not do and, in fact, is impossible for him. Of course it is understandable that he wants to keep the old Phædrus out of mind and out of sight; he was insane and meant nothing but trouble. A genius and a creative thinker, Phædrus is in the eyes of the present narrator" too smart to evade nihilism," losing himself and all perspective in his interest in "pure nothing". The present narrator has gone to the other extreme. Says Gross: "So threatened is he by the world of abstraction and speculation that had seduced Phædrus, he has become the supreme pragmatist, technician, maintenance man." (203) So, he spends all his time and energy trying to submerge Phædrus, keeping himself "in the hard grip of nuts and bolts, systems and procedures." (Gross, 204) Yet by being so preoccupied with his internal fight against Phædrus, he subconsciously isolates himself, so that his son, whom he expresses great concern for, can not reach him. The lack of communication between father and son only magnifies their problems. Sooner or later, though, the narrator will have to admit that his private battle is a lost cause and that he was destined to lose it from the beginning. Not because he is destined to be crazy, locked up for life behind bars, but because he cannot reject someone who is an undeniable part of himself. Besides, his present line of action is not getting him anywhere, just making him stuck in an unpleasant situation. The narrator most likely knows it all the time but refuses to acknowledge the fact that he is virtually nobody without Phædrus. More than once does he talk about how he has to imitate the person he once was when meeting old friends, people who used to know Phædrus and expect the narrator to be that person. It saddens and depresses him for it makes him feel empty. This is how he describes an encounter with one of his oldest and dearest friends, Deweese:
In my memory is a movie about a World War I spy who studied the behaviour of a captured German officer (who looked exactly like him) by means of a one-way mirror. He studied him for months until he could imitate every gesture and nuance of speech. Then he pretended to be the escaped officer in order to infiltrate the German Army command. I remember the tension and excitement as he faced his first test with the officer's old friends to learn if they would see through his imposture. Now I've some of the same feeling about Deweese, who'll naturally presume I'm the person he once knew. (Zen, 122)
In the same way the narrator has had to learn from other people and from notes and diaries Phædrus had written what he himself used to be like. From that information he can imitate the person he is supposed to be. Deweese, Phædrus's old friend, whom the narrator visits on his journey, does not know what has happened to him since he last saw him, and therefore expects little to have changed. It makes the narrator think about what and who he is and the depression is obvious when he compares himself to Phædrus: "... the person they're ... referring to isn't much these days. Just another middle-class, middle-aged person getting along. Worried mainly about Chris, but beyond that nothing special. But ... there was someone, a person who lived here once, who was creatively on fire with a set of ideas no one had ever heard of before..." (Zen, 141) Even the things he says in his Chautauquas, about technology, quality, duality and all the rest, "... they are not my own. I haven't really had a new idea in years. They are stolen from him." (Zen, 33) Despite his resentment towards Phædrus and the wish that Phædrus must never make himself heard or felt again, the narrator misses the person that he used to be. As Gross puts it, it is fear, desperate fear of becoming insane again, that makes him continue his "exhausting, unavailing battle to submerge his former self." (Gross, 208) He has bought his sanity as a high price and he is not about to give it up.
What exactly causes the alienation between father and son is a mystery until the end of the book when it becomes clear to the father at last that he himself is the cause. By renouncing his past self he is denying Chris the father he needs. As the book developes, and the story of Phædrus progresses, the narrator becomes more and more insecure and unbalanced. He starts having disturbing dreams, involving Chris, in which the narrator is behind a glass door with Chris on the other side, trying to get his father to open the door. It has been obvious through the course of the book that the narrator and Chris are not communicating. Something is very wrong in their relationship. Chris has started to show beginning symptoms of a mental disorder and the narrator has no idea what he should do about it. He only knows that Chris is continually reaching out to him for something the father is not giving because he knows not what Chris wants. Long before the narrator realises what the problem is the reader can see the reason for the alienation: Chris needs his father but the person posing as his father is not the father Chris needs or knows. Not only has the "extensive electrochock therapy deadened a whole line of experience"(Gross, 201) but it has also changed his personality. The father that Chris needs simply is not there, or as Gross says: "Since his father's breakdown and rehabilitation Chris hasn't had a father at all, just this man so desperate for sanity that he has gone along with the obliteration of self." (210)
The third dream finally gets the message through. In previous dreams, Chris tries to get his father to open the glass door seperating them. However, he never does because he is afraid to do so. In the third and last dream, he is not stopped by his fear but by a strange figure. The stranger is trying to prevent the narrator from opening the door, yet at the same time, the narrator can sense that the unknown apparition is afraid of him. This gives him strength to approach the figure to see who it is, and seeing that it is his own face, he finally gives up his fight against Phædrus. The awful truth finally surfaces:
The dreamer isn't me at all.
It's Phædrus.
He's waking up.
A mind divided agains't itself ... me ... I'm the evil figure in the shadows. I'm the loathsome one.... (Zen, 298)
The realisaton is so devastating that he is prepared to commit himself to the nearest mental hospital. He is so certain that since Phædrus has so obviously returned, he himself must be insane again. What is even worse is that all this time that the narrator could feel Phædrus trying to get out, he was doing his utmost to keep him down, convinced insanity was trying to break lose. As it turns out, he was wrong and had been the whole time: Phædrus's reemergence happened only because of Chris.
Chris's mentality is threatened, very likely because of all the things that happened to his father and the only person really able to help him is his father. But the father Chris is reaching out to is not the narrator, but Phædrus. And Phædrus, the real father, the real self, senses Chris's troubles and tries to break free to answer his son's call. This is the message of the dreams. According to Gross, Chris wants Phædrus because, "For Chris even a madman is a better father than this defensive, self-contained, analytical shell."... (209) But Phædrus cannot return and replace the narrator, for he has been eliminated, wiped out, destroyed-he can never become again what he once was. Besides, no one wants him back, for, according to all sources, he was an obsessive maniac. That is not to say, however, that the narrator's current state of mind is any better. At the present moment is just as obsessive as Phædrus used to be, only this time he is blinded by his desperate need for sanity and his almost hysterical fear of Phædrus's, and simultaneously his own, madness. As a result, he clings to his precious sanity like a drowning man clings to a rock: it saves his life for a short while but eventually he will have to let go, it is only a question of when. He is unable to see the truth of his situation, to see "the blatant inauthenticity of the self he cannot sustain," and "the validity of the enemy he cannot overthrow." (Gross, 210) Every time he has one of his dreams, he speaks in his sleep to Chris in a different voice-Phædrus's voice. In the end, when both father and son are literally on the brink of madness, it is Phædrus's voice, coming through the narrator, which makes everything right. Throughout the book, the narrator has to imitate his former self and steal his ideas because on his own he has nothing to offer. He can never hold on to sanity for its own sake. Especially since it is enforced. Gross sums it up:
The true evil in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is enforced sanity ... the inauthentic self, however safe, however rigidly maintained, is unsustainable because of both outward and inward pressures .... The narrator's dreams to indeed mark the "return" of Phædrus, simply because they are Phædrus's dreams. Phædrus is his authentic self and that's the only self that dreams. (210)
He has to learn to accept his insane self, otherwise he will never become a whole person again and consequently never acquire true sanity. For a long time he continues to be "a mind divided against itself" and just before the end he is virtually on the brink of madness again. Not until then does he give up fighting Phædrus but as Gross points out "His acknowledgement that he is insane again-is Phædrus again-frees him from the necessity of blocking Phædrus anymore," and "it is when the battle can no longer be carried on that the narrator stands a chance." (208) He finally lets go of his value rigidities, and then for the first time he comes into true contact with Chris which discovers his father is still there and that saves both of them: "But it is not Phædrus who is riding off into the sunset, happy and helmetless with Chris. Rather is it someone new, neither the narrator nor Phædrus. It is a person born of both who, crucially, is no longer resisting what he is." (Gross, 211)
The old Phædrus, in Zen, had wanted to unite the two countercultures, romantic and classic because he believed the split to be unnatural. That is the message of the Chautauquas; making whole what has been divided. The new Phædrus preaches the same thing in Lila: static value patterns have to go hand in hand with Dynamic value patterns for the world to stay balanced. That is the only Quality there is. What makes the argument stronger and gives it life is the fact that the narrator himself, particularly in Zen, proves the best example. As the world he describes so passionately is being troubled by schizophrenia, so is he himself even more troubled by the same thing. He sees the necessity for synthesizing the two opposing understandings of reality but he fails to see his own. He can see Quality as the great healer of the world's dualism but is unable to apply it to his own life. What is going on is that his own value rigidities are blinding him; his desperate need for sanity gets him stuck in a mental state he cannot sustain. By wanting to discard a necessary part of himself he is attempting to maintain his own personal split, which goes against everything else he says in his book.
Seventeen years later the same narrator appears in another book called Lila; this time calling himself Phædrus. It is clear from the start that this time the narrator is at peace with himself. He finished his fighting in Zen. Although he is a whole person "in harmony as and with himself" (Gross, 213), he is not done with sanity. Beverly Gross wrote her article on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in 1984, that is seven years prior to the publishing of Lila. Still, some of the things she says can also be applied to the second book; partly because many of the subjects discussed in the Chautauquas are discussed further in Lila. Also, because Gross, in her article, shows remarkable insight as to what Zen is about, and it is as if she can predict which way the narrator's-or Phædrus's mind-will lead him. Quality and insanity are the two topics very much on Pirsig's mind and they are the main themes in both of the books. In both books, "the narrator had to rethink sanity": how valuable is sanity in itself? In the narrator's case it was clearly not a quality thing, especially in relation to Chris, at least not the kind of sanity he had acquired. The restoration of sanity has to be a dialectical, organic process. To stop where the narrator wanted to stop, where the headshrinkers (apt phrase) had stopped him, is violent resistance to the forces of self and change and history. (Gross, 212)
In other words: he has to find his sanity himself, he cannot have it handed to him on a silver platter and think he is saved. Fortunately, he realises this in Zen, at the very end, making him more sane than he has ever been before since his rehabilitation and this time he is able to maintain his sanity. This makes him capable of developing his earlier ideas about Quality, and the nature of insanity in Lila. As Quality had once made him crazy and then made him sane again, it is fitting that he should develop a Metaphysics of Quality and then use it to explain and "rethink" sanity. It is his son who finally makes him realise how important it is for him to become whole again. Only then does he acquire true sanity and ultimately Quality. It is fitting to end on a quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenace, two sentences which say in so many words what it is all about: "You have to have a sense of what's good. That is what carries you forward." (255)
1 Beverly Gross, "'A Mind Divided Against Itself': Madness in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" in Journal of Narrative Technique. Fall, 1984, pp. 201-213. back
2 Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (New York: Bantam Press, 1991), p. 327. back
3 Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (New York: Batnam Books, 1989), p. 123. back
Gross, Beverly. "'A Mind Divided Against Itself': Madness in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" in Journal of Narrative Technique. Fall, 1984, pp. 201-213.
Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. New York: Bantam Books, 1989.
Pirsig, Robert M. Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. New York: Bantam Press, 1991.
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