» Sunday, 26 August A.D. 2007
motorcycle maintenance
I picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (hereafter known as ZAMM) from the library recently and have been thoroughly enjoying it. I picked it up for two reasons.
One is because I remember reading a book on Datsun 240Z maintenance when I was working at Ameritrade; the husband of the couple I was staying with had a beat-up Datsun 240Z in the garage and he clearly hoped to resuscitate it at some later point. I believe this book referenced ZAMM approvingly as a book in the same sort of spirit. Which is a bit of a puzzle if you've actually read a bit of ZAMM, because the book only talks about motorcycle maintenance as a way of moving the story along. Nonetheless, it piqued my interest long ago and I recently had the chance to satisfy it.
The second reason is much more recent; Shelley Powers linked a review recently and wrote what I then interpreted as, “I felt it wasn't really the sort of book for me.” Anything that Shelley Powers feels isn't for her is worthwhile for me to check out! Now that I read her comment afresh, however, it doesn't carry exactly that sense. But it makes a good impetus and a good general rule, I think.
When flipping through it in the library, I was pretty sure I was going to enjoy it after reading in the introduction:
The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it “freedom,” but in the final analysis “freedom&rdquo is a purely negative goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren't really offering any alternative other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.
While reading it last night, I was struck by this passage:
But one day in the classroom the professor of [Indian] philosophy was blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the world for what seemed the fiftieth time and Phaedrus [the author] raised his hand and asked coldly if it was believed that the atomic bombs that had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. The professor smiled and said yes. That was the end of the exchange.
Within the traditions of Indian philosophy that answer may have been correct, but for Phaedrus and for anyone else who reads newspapers regularly and is concerned with such things as mass destruction of human beings that answer was hopelessy inadequate. He left the classroom, left India, and gave up.
...and how similar it is to this one, from Francis Schaeffer's The God Who Is There:
One day I was talking to a group of people in the room of a young South African in Cambridge University. Among others, there was present a young Indian who was of Sikh background but a Hindu by religion. He started to speak strongly against Christianity, but did not really understand the problems of his own beliefs. So I said, “Am I not correct in saying that on the basis of your system, cruelty and noncruelty are ultimately equal, that there is no intrinsic difference between them?” He agreed. The people who listened and knew him as a delightful person, an “English gentleman” of the very best kind, looked up in amazment. But the student in whose room we met, who had clearly understood the implications of what the Sikh had admitted, picked up his kettle of boiling water with which he was about to make tea, and stood with it steaming over the Indian's head. The man looked up and asked him what he was doing, and he said with a cold yet gentle finality, “There is no difference between cruelty and noncruelty.” Thereupon the Hindu walked out into the night.
posted by Nate @ 6:26PM