this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Man, you and I have seriously different takes on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance :)
I'm fully on board with self reliance and DIY, but that guy was constantly insufferable to his family and friends just to try to make the point :)
I was reading it and it just annoyed me so I moved over to the audiobook as I often do if I feel I have a bad take on a read, it just made it worse :)
Could very well be. Similarly to Walden, I read it for school, and did not much care for it. One of the few concrete points I remember being discussed was a comparison between a character that rides a rickety old bike, but knows how to keep it running, and the character who rides a new bike, but relies on mechanics when things do inevitably break on it. That sort of rumination on a man who can fix things being happier than a man who can't is basically the entire premise of Walden.
Furthermore, in refreshing my memory of what subjects Prisig touched upon, I see/vaguely remember his attempts to reconcile rational empiricism with intuitive understanding, which is also very Thoreau.
However, as I've said, I didn't particularly enjoy my brush with either text, and it's been 15+ years since I last looked through either. So, it's entirely possible that they are actually philosophical polar opposites and my C- in Philosophy 101 was well earned.
I didn't doubt that's where Prisig was going with it. He just made the character so uninviting, conceited, and self centered that the message itself seemed to get lost. It felt like I was watching a movie where I hated the main character.
Yes, I also really struggled with his writing style. It felt like he was layering in additional degrees of obfuscation by creating meta-characters and framing his philosophical points in the form of fictionalized conversations from this road trip he took. Like, bud, you're already talking about abstracted concepts like Platonic Good. Do we REALLY need more abstraction?
To which Prisig, author of the most (financially) successful book on philosophy in America, would say, "Evidently, yes."
At least Thoreau came by his difficult to parse writing style honestly, being a product of the 19th century and all.