This week on The Marketplace of Ideas, a conversation with Mark Richardson, auto and motorcycle editor at the Toronto Star and author of Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Almost forty years after the release of Pirsig’s beloved “nonfiction novel” Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Richardson packed his own bike and retraced Pirsig’s journey for enlightenment through the
American midwest, meeting both fans of and characters from the book along the way.
The Marketplace of Ideas airs every Tuesday morning at 8:00 am.
I am about half way through the audible.com version of “Zen and Now” – it’s a fascinating journey of one man through another man’s journey. Huh? This turns out to be more zen than it first appears. The author, Richardson, does a great job of time travel, popping back and forth between his own trip and Pirsig’s 40 years earlier, and he also demonstrates how motorcycles and road trips lead to introspection. I highly recommend the book (so far). I only read Pirsig’s book once and found it an obscure read. Thanks to Richardson’s retrospection, I am learning a lot about what Pirsig was trying to accomplish.
Jerry Waxler
Memory Writers Network