Vintage Motorcycles

Something mysterious about vintage bikes, something pleasing.
Scary machines? or works of art?

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance 

A surface-level appeal of this book to me when I was younger, and even now, is that it goes into some detail about maintaining a motorcycle. As someone who owned a motorcycle and spent time tinkering with it, reading about engine seizures and rich cylinders was almost sentimental for me. Pirsig uses the notion of motorcycle maintenance to illustrate the core idea that I got out of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is about reconciling classical and romantic modes of thinking. This reconciliation is something I've managed to do in my life and enjoy immensely. However, in this respect, G"odel, Escher, Bach has been a bigger influence (Hofstadter talks about the reconciliation of reductionism and wholism). The reason is that the latter is far more rigourous in its treatment, combining the mathematics, the sciences, philosophy, and the arts in a coherent manner. Pirsig essentially neglects the mathematics and the sciences when he talks about the metaphysics of Quality. The Zen aspect of this reconciliation comes in accepting the fact that there are bound to be fundamental contradictions when that occurs (which, in the case of number theory, is predicted by G"odel's Incompleteness Theorem).
One of the most clever ideas in this work is the notion that even though the "purpose of [sic] scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths", "it is science itself that is leading mankind from a single absolute truths to multiple indeterminate ones". This is not platitude---the more we know, the space of the unknown becomes larger (it is not that we discover that it is larger, but that it actually becomes larger). This is like the theory of relativity which predicts that as we travel faster, the time taken is lesser (not just that we get someplace sooner). As a scientist, I completely agree, but that's the beauty of doing science (in a way, it's job security), and the reason wholistic approaches are essential (the expansion occurs only in the classical mode of thinking; as a romanticist, you can putatively view the entire Universe in one single clear thought).
Pirsig quotes Einstein (in page 115) as saying "Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself superior to the rest," and using that as an argument to bolster the view that there are multiple indeterminate truths in science. While that statement about evolution is wrong, the statement about science isn't: in fact scientific theory in the 20th century itself points to such truths (from relativity and quantum mechanics to G"odel's Incompleteness theorem). Pirsig at times does come-off a bit as a techno-luddite. There is also strong new-age spiritual quality to this book that only burdens it. The conundrums Pirsig focuses can easily be dealt without resorting to fluff. Again, I refer to G"odel, Escher, Bach for a better treatment.
http://www.ram.org/ramblings/books/zen_and_the_art_of_motorcycle_maintenance.html

Someone with the same ideas as me, wrote that excerpt, My son rides a Kawasaki, scary! too fast!
but Wow! I have to admit, I like the STYLE!