Derek Kehler

I am reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance. Just to give you a bit of background: if I had known what this book was actually about, I would never have read it. The amazing thing is that my mind has been opened to a whole new realm of thought… and a whole new genre of novels!

When I first picked this book up I had no idea that it was so much more than a simple story. I was on holidays, and it was one of the books in a stack that stood out to me. The title was oddly intriguing, and so I picked it up.

At first the story of a father and his teenage son riding together on a motorcycle across the country caught my attention. However, as I read on, the narrator (the father) began to describe a previous life in which he lost his mind. As the story goes on, and they retrace the steps of his previous life, he becomes more engorged in the thought processes that got him there.

As I dig deeper into this book, I am finding that the author is describing the idea of two types of personalities/philosophies: Romantics and Classics. Romantics, being people that see beauty in the perception (or the overall creation) of things. And classics, being people that find beauty in the physics behind them.

At first, I thought that he was describing these two philosophies as being in contrast to each other. Instead, he goes on to state that there is actually beauty in the contrast between the two. The title “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” refers to the perception of qualitative evidence, and that our perception of “reality” is actually what defines reality… or maybe more accurately, our perception IS reality.

This is a read that only comes around once in a while, and is a great book for the unphilosophical and philosophical alike.