For 50 years, people have been travelling the Zen Route across America, most for a day or two at a time, some for the full two weeks from Minneapolis to San Francisco.
Like many others, it took me a while to read the book. I first heard of it as a teenager and gave it a try then, but it wasn’t really about motorcycles and was a tough read. I read maybe 50 pages. A few years later, I tried it again and made it perhaps 100 pages in, before bumping up against references to ancient philosophers and drifting to something more accessible. Then I gave it a try as a summer cottage read and, this time, pressed through to the end.
The story itself is mostly true and actually happened, but the answer to “What is quality?” is not so straightforward as you may think, and especially not to Pirsig, who was a tortured genius. Years before his motorcycle journey, it literally drove him insane, and in 1961, after chasing his first wife, Nancy, through their house and holding a gun to her head, he was finally committed to a mental hospital.