ON QUALITY

The author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance returns with a hodgepodge collection on the slippery concept of quality.

Assembled by Pirsig’s wife, Wendy, after the author’s death in 2017, the book distills the metaphysical essence of the generation-defining Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and its lesser-known sequel, Lila, into an accessible philosophical handbook. Excerpting from Pirsig’s letters, interviews, presentations, and books, the text seeks to offer clarity on the concept of quality—even though it “cannot be defined.” To philosophically inclined readers for whom this paradox is intriguing, this book will prove to be a handy reference. To readers for whom Zen is less a treatise in disguise than a story of a father-son road trip, this distillation may seem superfluous. Still, it’s arguably the best chance for quality to receive the kind of philosophical scrutiny Pirsig thought it could withstand. In a letter from 1995, he wrote, “There are many other problems solved by the [Metaphysics of Quality] but any of the above seems to me to justify it as a major philosophic system. That it solves all of them simultaneously makes it of unequalled magnitude.” It’s interesting, historically, that this is where Pirsig’s ideas should end up. As he describes in the talk that serves as the book’s introduction, he wrote Zen as a novel precisely to avoid the impression of being “high and mighty and talking down” to readers. By making the narrator a man on a motorcycle trip, he notes, “we get another dimension to the entire story. Now we no longer have a person talking from a pulpit. We have a person out in front, out in the open, in real life.” Either that concern was unfounded or Wendy’s editorial efforts have obviated it. Though sometimes scattered, the book is impassioned and serious but never condescending—and always generous.

We might call it a metaphysical primer that is, of all things, fun to read. Or we might just call it quality.