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"What’s new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question, "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.

I don't give a damn about motorcycles, but I do care about learning how to live. "If only I could analyze all the angles and really master my life!" part of me cries. "But it's got to be lived, in the end," another part replies. You can't master it before living it.

Tension. What I want and what I have are not the same. Where to find a happy balance? How to do this thing we call Life right?

"We're living in topsy-turvy times and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences."


The idea that living strictly rationally, according solely to the dictates of Reason, leads to a dead-end is appealing and Prisig's system of thought, which he calls the Metaphysics of Quality and which doubles as both a conception of reality and a values system, offers an antidote to consumer burnout and the inadequacies of a developed world. You need Reason and rational thinking to operate, but you don't want to lose sight of the Romantic frame of mind. He presents his arguments so methodically (and so rationally) that it becomes a lulling sort of mantra, almost. The point is not to examine motorcycling, of course. That's only a convenient means of illustration. The point is to examine character, and how it's expressed through our actions or manifested in our lives. Substitute motorcycles for whatever subculture you like and the lessons might be the same. These ideas are old, but Pirsig shares them here with a commanding earnestness that makes them seem alive again. He is quiet, thoughtful, meditative. But also dry, sometimes starkly spartan. And the book grows meandering, loses focus for long stretches at a time. Perhaps this is intended to provide illustration through example, but it's not something I appreciated.

3.5 stars. Maybe a 5 for a certain crowd, at a certain time of life. It gave me some food for thought, some interesting considerations to mull over, but in the end I don't think I can call it life-changing.