Robert Persig, 88. Author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, one of my favorite books.
“Zen” is the account of a 1968 motorcycle trip that Pirsig, his 11-year-old son Chris and two friends made from Minneapolis through the West. A fifth traveler was sensed but unseen: Phaedrus, Pirsig’s alter ego, brilliant, uncompromising and obsessed with the search for truth. Like the real-life Pirsig, the ghost-like Phaedrus had an IQ of 170, entered a university at 15 and, as a young man, was committed to mental hospitals where he underwent electroconvulsive therapy.
“He was dead,” Pirsig’s narrator writes in “Zen.” “Destroyed by order of the court, enforced by the transmission of high-voltage alternating current through the lobes of his brain.”
On the trip, though, the “dead” Phaedrus was all too active, a real but intangible force vying for the soul of the emotionally unstable Chris. Chris is spared in the novel, but Pirsig’s actual son Chris struggled with drug addiction and, at 22, was stabbed to death during a 1979 mugging in San Francisco. It was at a bus stop near the Zen Buddhism center where he lived.
While the book has a more or less happy ending, “Zen” is filled with unanswered and, perhaps, unanswerable questions. Pirsig, who weathered schizophrenia but was devastated by its treatment, doubts everything: reality, sanity — and himself.
“What I am,” he writes, “is a heretic who’s recanted and thereby in everyone’s eyes saved his soul. Everyone’s eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.”
