Read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

A great book, I think that I will read it again, I think that it’s one of those books where you can get something new out of it every time you read it. Gary is re-reading it so that we can talk about some of the ideas brought up in the book. A great book for book club discussion!!

so i finished it. im not sure what i think, other than the guy writing the book was crazy and pretty socially obnoxious. i felt really, really bad for his son chris. it was well written, but i wonder about some of the philosophy. the nature of quality gives us evidence that it is, in fact, subjective. am i wrong? for example, lets say we have a sapling tree tied to a stake to keep it growing upright. a lumberjack will look at that tree and say, “it’s small and has very little wood,” giving it a low quality. a painter will look at the tree and say, “its a pretty tree, but that unsightly stake keeping it upright dampens the aesthetic appeal,” giving it a moderate quality. and a gardener will look at that tree and say, “its in a great spot in the yard and the stake will make sure it grows well.” also, i question some of the stuff in the afterword. he asks where his son goes when he dies, and says that if his son is really gone, that challenges the law of conservation of energy. this is really weak. clearly, his son’s death is not the destruction of matter, rather the movement of matter in such a way that forms dead chris instead of living chris. if i take a television and smash it up with a baseball bat, i am not destroying any matter, but i am destroying the molecular makeup known as a television. its just the untangling of a pattern.

so im on page 326, and to be honest i’m kind of lost. it doesn’t seem rational for him to be claiming that quality is metaphysically between mind and matter. i might have missed something, but i think his reason for believing this is that quality is something that our mind attributes to the matter around it. thus, he argues, it is between both. however, this is not a sound argument. while it is true that quality is something that our mind attributes to matter around it, that does not make it external from the mind. clearly, if there were no matter, there could be no mind. the mind is defined by its interactions with matter. one of these interactions if the attribution of quality. what makes quality something so metaphysical? seems to me like it’s just a working of our consciousness like anything else we experience.

...Found it!

Now to devour it. :-)

...but after reading some of the entries here, I definitely want to read it again. Today seems like a perfect day to start, but I can’t find my copy. I’m off sick from work and the cocktail of drugs I’ve just taken (codiene, paracetamol and Ibuprofen) have just kicked in so things are feeling a little weird.

Bonus is, I found my copy of Sophies World, so could read that instead today…

good book so far! it has definitely got a reaction out of me. there is some great narration going on here. i love the part when they’re all at the campfire, and they suddenly go quiet, and the narrator thinks, ”...suddenly we are all separate, all alone in our private universes…” i definitely feel this often. despite me enjoying his narration, i hate the narrator himself. he really is socially inept and pretty arrogant, but this reaction of mine keeps me reading too. a little past page 100 so far!

This book is like an annotated bibliography with a plot.

the author rambles incessantly trying stage the basis of his flawed philosophies.

this book is amazing!

Not light reading, and not really about either Zen or motorcycles.