Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. PirsigMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
What made my reading of this book so interesting was that I was given my copy by my friend Pete who is an engineer. Every Friday night Pete and I ride our pushbikes 25 kms around the east side of Singapore, drink a beer or two and ride back again. We talk: Pete about engineering, me about teaching and the books I read. One Friday Pete passed me a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and said he'd always wanted to read it; he'd bought two copies and we could read and chat about it each week. Thus began a remarkable bookclub.
What Pete loved and helped me to see better was the idea of an engineering problem as holistic. When things go wrong you can treat the symptom or you can think more holistically to understand the nature of the system. But, as Zen and the Art explains, the engineering systems we engage with also include the user as an integral element and so the problem is always more than just physics. The relationships between humans and the world we shape are reciprocal and complex and engineering is art as well as science.
That's the easy bit. Prisig then goes into an exploration of how the reification of the mechanical world seeps into the management of education and the human sciences. Somewhere around the last third of the book my understanding began to waver and Pete's company recalled him to the US. I'm not sure what we would or could have made of this last section. I'm not even sure whether Pirsig knows. At some point, it seems to me, all great writing reaches the limits of what can be said. Pirsig pushes those limits leaving me grateful for what I have understood, and a little in awe of what I have not.
I highly recommend the book, bike-riding book clubs, and clever people who see the world differently to you.
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