Eh, fate happens. I was walking home in the rain a few weeks ago, and noticed, as I rounded the corner in to Hancock Place, that someone had left a milk crate full of books out on the sidewalk. Cambridgites regularly deposit whole living rooms of stuff out on the curb, and though this batch had clearly just been released in to the wild,  the pages were already getting wet and waffly with the rain.  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig was on top, which I have heard of and in fact gone so far as to describe as a Great Book over the years, but in that special way I've heard and relayed the same about For Whom The Bell Tolls or Angela's Ashes , which is to say without ever actually taking the time to find out for myself. I grabbed it, along with a copy of Bell Jar, and set them both up next to the kitchen fan to dry.

Zen has quickly became a morning staple. Lauryl found a worn out old reading chair a while ago - another sidewalk orphan - that now sits near a window in the living room, snug between an aluminum ventilation pipe and a yellowing IKEA lamp. I get up early, so I'll usually head downstairs in the dim, pre-morning blue before everyone's up, find some coffee, flip on the lamp and flop down for a few chapters while the caffeination sets in. I'm about half way through at this point, which is far enough to realize that Zen is not at all great the way a classic, For Whom The Bell Tolls type-book is great, but is great in ways that are difficult to describe to other people. And part of this difficulty is that it's greatness has something to do with timing. With that chair. As recently as a few months ago I was the sort of person you couldn't have paid enough to crack open a book with Zen in the title, but this year has been different in jarring ways and for the first time in a while I've found myself casting about for what I guess you'd call answers, and in spots I had not previously thought to look.

Speaking of which

Weirdly, where I have thought to look - at least over the last while - is the writing of David Foster Wallace, whose speech at Kenyon College is held up by a lot of people - myself included - as a perfect encapsulation of how absolutely vital empathy and awareness are " in the day to day trenches of adult existence". Somehow he says this without sounding trite or prescriptive or self-helpy, which is probably why, when I first read the speech back in 2008, it stuck, and struck me as an answer, though to what I wasn't entirely sure. What's funny about this w/r/t Pirsig & Zen is that since Wallace's death, those responsible for curating his estate have discovered that he absolutely devoured self help books in numbers that make you wonder if his success lay in simply being able to repackage the whole self help attitude in a manner that didn't disgust graduate students.

Anyways

This is not to say that I didn't dive in to Zen all squinty eyed and cynical, but Pirsig manages to maneuver through the spiritual bits in a way that seems genuine. Human. Feels a little like Jonathan Safran Foer in Eating Animals (another book I didn't think I'd like), where my impatience with preachy moralizing was more or less placated by a long introduction about how he - the author! - had to overcome his own skepticism before realizing that the big question (ie. the one underpinning the book) was an important one. Easy trick. In Foer's case, the question was whether his as-yet-unborn kid should eat meat. Pirsig, on the other hand, is considering the ways that classical reasoning has failed to provide modern society with an adequate definition for quality, which, for him at least,  creates this huge philosophical schism between the technologically adept and everyone else. Except the way he explains it makes the whole chain of thought sound way less schizophrenic.

He picks his way through arguments carefully; never too elaborate, never plodding, and that midwestern pace, that clarity - if you'll let me separate clarity from its object for a moment - has become the real gift of this book. So far as I've read, there doesn't appear to be any real modern analog to the technology bits (ie. Zen and the Art of the Status Update wouldn't really work out, thank god), and while I expect the philosophical stuff will pick up at some point past the half-way mark, for now the magic is just as much about the voice and the chair and the pale blue hour as it is what's being said.

...

I'll stop there. This is a blog after all, winding my way around to an actual point would ruin the fun.