Being featured in Car and Driver this week reminded me of when my hero, Neil Peart, the drummer for Rush, read and reviewed Zen and Now, while touring with the band in 2008. Neil was a voracious reader and began a website of his reviews called Bubba’s Book Club, which you can still see here.
It was a true honour when Neil recommended Zen and Now as one of his Top 100 books. It’s an eclectic list that includes Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, of course, but to be narrowed down into the 100 when I know he read literally thousands of books is humbling. I wish I could send him a copy of Running on Empty, but he died from brain cancer in 2020.
You can read Neil’s review of Zen and Now here, but I’ve made a copy to save you the link.
Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Mark Richardson
Earlier this summer, a representative from this book’s publisher sent me a pre-publication copy, wondering if I might like to read it, and perhaps offer “a few kind words.” I was flattered to be described as “Canada’s most famous motorcycle memoirist,” but that might be akin to the Flight of the Conchords boasting about being “New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk-parody duo.” Still, it’s nice.
The book sounded interesting. The author is a motoring journalist for the Toronto Star, and set out to follow the motorcycle journey taken by Robert Pirsig and his son, Chris, in 1968, a journey that shaped the enduring classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values. That book has sold more than five million copies in the past forty years, and I count myself among its admirers-from long before I had ever ridden a motorcycle-and of its equally profound and tortured sequel, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals.
However, I knew I wouldn’t have time to do Zen and Now justice right then, or write an appropriate response, for I was in the middle of a tour (again!), and these days, my “empty hours” on the road are filled with motorcycling. That leaves little time for reading or writing. So I politely replied to the publisher in words to that effect, and said I would try to send them something in time for the second edition (an optimistic wish, kindly intended).
I packed Zen and Now in my bike bags, and carried it with me on my journeys for a while. One day in late June, after a long day on my motorcycle, riding solo up through the back roads of Nebraska, South Dakota, and into Minnesota (between shows in Denver and Milwaukee), I fetched up in Austin, Minnesota. On my own at the Holiday Inn, I cleaned up and changed, then took Zen and Now to dinner with me.
In the evening sunshine (long days in June, at that northern latitude), I took an outside table at Torge’s Live Sports Bar and Grill and opened the book. I was hooked immediately, not least because the story opens … on a back road in Minnesota. The author was setting out from Minneapolis, as Pirsig and his son had so many years ago, determined to follow the same route west to San Francisco. I was also hooked by the author’s sensibility, as expressed in this early paragraph:
The only way to truly experience a road like this is to be out in the open-not shut up in a car but riding along on top of it on a motorcycle. It’s tough to explain to someone who’s only ever traveled behind a windshield, sealed in with the comforting thunk of a closing door. On a bike there’s no comforting thunk. The road is right there below you, blurring past your feet, ready to scuff your sole should you pull your boot from the peg and let it touch the ground. The wind is all around you and through you while the sun warms your clothing and your face. Take your left hand from the handlebar and place it in the breeze and it rises and falls with the slipstream as if it were a bird’s wing. Breathe in and smell the new-mown grass. Laugh out loud and your voice gets carried away on the wind.
Hallelujah, brother pilgrim of the open road.
Mark Richardson also has a journalist’s training and instincts, and stops often along his way, talking to people and collecting their stories. He describes those characters with humor, compassion, and insight, even while he satisfies his own quest-which, like all journeys worth taking, turns out to be altogether different than he expected.
A central tenet of the philosophy Robert Pirsig illuminated in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is as simple-and as complicated-as, “If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well.”
Richardson applied that same philosophy to his road trip, and then to his account of it, and here comes that blurb the publisher asked me for, offered with pleasure and a nod of my motorcycle helmet: “Zen and Now is a story worth telling, about a journey worth sharing-an entertaining, inspiring, and rewarding read.”