Thirty years ago, while practicing to be a university professor—something from which I subsequently moved away—Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was one of the texts I required my students to read. There are few books that have held as much meaning for me, and I still have a first printing, heavily marked and annotated, on my office bookshelf.
Pirsig’s sequel, Lila also enjoys revered space on my bookshelf. But it was a more difficult book in some ways; denser and yet not as tightly written.
It’s on the occasion of the republication of Lila that Robert Pirsig has granted a last interview to The Guardian. While I’m glad Lila is being republished, I’d be especially interested in reading the original 800,000 words of Zen from which the first book was cut. That 121 publishers rejected the manuscript and that the book has never been picked up as a major academic text is a reflection of publishers and universities, not Pirsig.
0 responses. Comments closed for this article.