The Cycle from ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ Comes to Smithsonian
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
He gave it to me in response to one rambanctious outburst or other I'd had, over the subject of different cultures around different systems we were both hacking on. I'd said something like "man I hate those mainframe guys" or something. I'll never forget him looking at me, sagely, across the desk and saying "man, I've got a book you should read".
I guess he'd sensed some formative intolerance budding in my teenage mind, and intended to head it off.
Well, this book definitely set me on a path of peace and tranquility, and most of all, confidence in my own competence in the face of adversity, purely for the sake of adventure. I devoured the book in a weekend, and he and I became better friends and hackers for the fact that he dared to suggest I might ought to improve myself, just a little, through a bit of reading..
I've since seen this book recommended in many similar contexts over the decades. I believe its one of those books which, if you care enough about it, will give you a few tools for humility and confidence.
I'm in the muddle camp but have read a lot of these threads. Like an acid trip, I definitely don't think the book has any true, applicable insight to take from it.
Many people took Pirsig's quip in the forward about the book not being factual about motorcycles too literally:
"What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It's not very factual on motorcycles, either."
I didn't start riding street bikes until many years after I read the book, and it's been funny over the years whenever I've had one of those periods of utter exasperation and misery, the "why the hell did I decide to ride a motorcycle to the place I am right now" moments, I think about that passage and how they made it out alright. and i've only ever had modern fuel injected bikes with heated bits and waterproof stuff, hard not to admire the riders back then.
I didn't read it until my 20s after moving in with a GF and finding a paperback copy in her bookshelf having a well-worn spine. I've since decided any woman with a well-worn copy of ZAMM in her bookshelf is probably a keeper.
Honestly I’d have to reread the work for an in the weeds critique, but when I ask the question: “What of it?” I just never had a good answer.
* It may also be that if you approach the book looking for philosophy, wisdom, or zen, then you are doing it just as wrong as approaching the book looking for maintenance advice. That is, it may be a great book, just not of the type someone reading it from a philosophical perspective expects.
Torn between whether Quality is a subjective or objective phenomenon, Phaedrus eventually comes to the epiphany that it is in fact neither. Quality precedes subjectivity and objectivity—in fact, it is what allows for the separation of the world into subjective and objective realms in the first place.
Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh in calling this nonsense but I am quite harsh on philosophy in general (though I do have time for some of it). Maybe this epiphany is true for all I know but the text didn't seem to communicate why he thought so. I remember having many objections the text didn't answer, and being frustrated at lack of properly defined terms, even making allowance for his claim that quality is undefinable.
If anyone can justify the claim quoted above I'd be interested to hear it?
Is quality purely subjective? Everyone has their own version? No. There are levels of quality that we can all agree on, even if we don’t always understand why. Art. Writing. Photography. You know quality when you see it, but it defies a true definition. First instinct says it’s subjective, but universally pleasing forms and displays say otherwise.
They suggest there is such a thing as objective beauty (quality). Faces that are perfectly symmetrical are objectively more appealing. They are quality. They invoke a feeling of being drawn in. Accepting. Gravity.
Conversely, there are things that are objectively off-putting. Everyone hates them. They (almost) universally disgust us. Push us away. Anti-gravity.
Plenty of people will argue I’m wrong and anything Landing in either category is still subjective. There are people who enjoy having human feces in their mouth. Seems like that might be right.
Pirsig’s point is that the quality judgement, the thing that makes it possible for a thing to like or dislike (going all the way to electrons, neutrons, and protons “liking” and ”disliking” each other) another thing it’s engaged with is what makes it possible for the thing to begin to define subjects and objects, period.
What differentiates a subject from an object, if not some deep notion of “I like this, give me more of this” and “this hurts me, get it away”. That’s what he calls quality, and what he posits is at the basis of all that matters.
—-alright. I’ve had 3 Pliny’s tonight and I tried. If this is all nonsense, I’m eager to hear why so I can learn a thing or two and know more than I do now—-
I still don't think it's right, though. Firstly we have a problem with defining subjective/objective. For example a decent hammer is a high quality tool for hammering in nails, but a low quality tool for screwing in screws. Does that make the quality of a hammer subjective (depending on the context in which it is used) or objective (independent of human perception provided we can accept an objective goal of joining two pieces of wood) or subjective again (because it takes a human to decide on that goal)? I find it near meaningless to begin this debate without agreeing on terms.
Second, going all the way down to electrons, protons etc - this liking and disliking seems to be confusing different types of process altogether: computing/selecting from possible alternatives vs simple electromagnetism. That's not to deny that our brains might be powered by simple electromagnetism under the hood. But if you define "liking" for an electron as "moving towards a positive charge (momentum and other forces/quantum effects permitting)" and "disliking" as "moving towards a negative charge (similarly qualified)" then the electron will never experience the sensation of "dislike", while we as humans often do, so the parallel seems inappropriate.
As to whether quality is objective/subjective what's wrong with the explanation that individual tastes vary but there is usually some correlation between them due to the evolutionary forces that shape both us and our memes?
As to whether like/dislike defines subject/object what do you make of the person who dislikes their own body and would rather inhabit a different one?
As to whether quality is essential for definition of subject/object: I'm not convinced it is at all. Sure "quality" might break a crude model of subjectivity/objectivity (which can then be refined as above) but just because something broke our model doesn't make that thing essential to defining the model. I can break some form of logic (propositional? first order? I forget) by asking you to evaluate the truth of "this statement is false" but that didn't mean we needed that statement to define the logic in the first place.
And as to whether quality is undefinable: just because we repeatedly fail to define it doesn't mean it can't be.
Not wanting to be argumentative btw. I'm genuinely interested to get to the bottom of this if you have further thoughts.
You used the phrase, evolutionary forces in your explanation. To him, that’s quality.
The force that compelled the amoeba to move towards nutrients and away from danger is quality.
In Lila, written for something like 15 years after ZMM was published, he posits that quality can be broken into 2 essential forms: Dynamic quality and static quality. They basically correlate to liberalism and conservatism. In his mind, both are essential for evolutionary progress and are the source of all that is.
Dynamic quality is often random, unconventional, and disruptive. It’s some wild mutation that ends up being a positive, or some rogue actor who ends up birthing a movement for good. It is essential to progress beyond what is currently.
Static quality is all that is good currently. It’s the breadth of learned knowledge. It’s the safety of what’s gotten us this far. Abandoning it entirely is a recipe for chaos and potentially great loss.
In his estimation, the combination of these 2 forms of quality is what makes evolution work, and he believes humans are not the highest expression of evolution.
He outlines levels of the world that are conquered in the name of progress and that each one supersedes the one before it.
The first level is non-living matter. It’s just there, not doing much. The second is biological. It bends the non-living stuff to its will.
The next level is social. It uses the living stuff for its benefit. The good of the whole outweighs the good of the individuals. People are to the society like food is to people. They power it, create it, become it, and it carries on after they’re gone.
He uses the example of New York, consuming human productivity for its own benefit. Feasting on humans to grow bigger and stronger, and shitting them out the other side.
The final level, as he sees it, is intellectual. Ideas supersede the societies. They bend them to their will. The idea that slaves should be free is strong enough to risk destruction of the society.
His ethics is based on these levels. At the biological level, sex is always quality. At the societal level, the wrong sex can threaten the community / society and becomes more nuanced, only quality sometimes. Society > biology. At the intellectual level, slavery is bad, even though it results in strong communities and cities and has many benefits.
My plane is taking off, so I finished that off poorly, but read Lila is that’s at all intriguing. It’s my favorite book.
Ok, so what stands out to me is at each of those levels you can define an individual of sorts (proton, phenotype, society, meme) with goals (electromagnetic, genetic survival, ??, memetic survival). So I get what you mean that definition of goals (quality) goes hand in hand with definition of individual and therefore subject/object in this restricted model of reality.
But that's what this model seems to be to me, more of an ELI5 explanation than the grown up one. "the proton wants to move towards the electron, the rabbit wants to have babies, etc" is a simplified model that leverages our brain's skill at modelling motivations of other animals but falls prey to our tendency to see such motivation where it doesn't exist. Once you start testing this model by making predictions, it doesn't work because the levels work rather differently under the hood. Try using evolutionary principles at the social level to predict the growth of New York for example, and you are going to mispredict because New York isn't going to reproduce in any meaningful sense, it will either grow or die (there's a vague parallel to group selection controversies here but not that relevant). People (like the inhabitants of New York) and ideas (like ideas on how cities should be run), conversely, can be said to evolve due to mutation and reproduction and if you predict the growth of New York based on evolutionary influences from those levels you are more likely to succeed (alternatively you could take some sort of network/complexity approach but whatever works it isn't going to be city level evolution * ).
But let's not get hung up on evolution, it's just an example of how the levels differ so much in their details that the only correct overarching definition of quality for each level would appear to be "the thing the thing is going to do anyway", a definition so general as to be useless * . From that light the good student essay was the thing Phaedrus wanted (the standard he was trying to achieve in his students) but if we want theories to make useful predictions we need to predict when this will and won't happen (e.g. because the alcohol molecule's notion of 'quality' interferes with the student's brain's efforts to reproduce Phaedrus' notion thereof) which is where the model breaks down. Or maybe this theory isn't supposed to help predict anything but is supposed to help grade essays? but "what I wanted to see" is not a useful definition of quality for the student either.
*edit: unless it's morphic resonance a la Rupert Sheldrake, a theory so general you can state it as "whatever happens becomes more likely to happen again". But while at first sight that notion is strongly related to quality as defined by Pirsig, I think that may be an illusion caused by them both being super-general abstractions. MR is subtly different and although not accepted by scientific consensus that difference at least allows it to make testable predictions.
Thank you for helping me think through this stuff more (as my edit history would show!)
Yeah, there is a lot that you’re saying that’s a perfectly valid objection to my oversimplification, and maybe to his whole thing, but I’ll be the first to admit that it’s easy to take it apart the way I’ve relayed it. I put plenty of words in his mouth in my previous comment.
As mentioned, he spent 15 years writing the book because he wanted it to say it the right way.
There was a whole forum after it came out where a bunch of philosophy students would argue about his theories and what he meant and what that means and what falls into which category, and every once in a while he would pop in and say, “I see what you’re thinking, but no, that’s not what I meant at all, it’s actually this.”
I’d love to hear your thoughts on his own words though. You obviously know far more than I do about Philosophy.
Wikipedia of Metaphysics of Quality is probably a better cliff notes than me: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig%27s_Metaphysics_of_Qu...
Maybe I should track down that forum, but I suspect the experience would be akin to more than one experience I've had chatting with philosophers (one of which I am not, though I guess I've been exposed to a bit through one channel or another) where I try to draw something useful out of the discussion only to be told this isn't what it's about. "It's brave of you to try and summarize" were the words of one colleague giving a seminar at the time! Maybe I just don't get it, or maybe it's they who don't get it, but it seems beyond me to figure out which. Maybe this is where I get a bit middle aged and intolerant and decide that further effort on that part isn't a good use of my time, and if a philosophy isn't useful for something (including the valid use of just being an aesthetically pleasing thing to consider) then I don't have a lot of time for it. In terms of aesthetics you have helped me to see some more in ZAMM than before, though.
On my first reading of ZAMM the real epiphany moment was where he described the workings of a motorcycle then said "... one thing classical types won't notice about this is that it's really, really, boring" or words to that effect. True. I identify strongly with the classical worldview but also with all the "groovy" phenomena on the other side of the divide which I think are perfectly explainable classically it's just that most people fail to do so.
If you haven't come across Sheldrake before you may enjoy The New Science of Life. I may not endorse his conclusions but can heartily recommend his exploration of ideas.
The same could be said for my recent dive into David Foster Wallace. Absolutely loving reading his writing, but more affirmation of my own thoughts than expansion. I also realize this is probably because I’m reading both decades after publication, which means time has caught up to their ahead of the curve ideas.
The most I’ve gotten out of a book, in terms of altering the way I think about the world and life, is Simone De Beauvoir and the Ethics of Ambiguity. Man, I love me some Simone.
It is akin to the Tao, or your flow experience where you are immersed into the thing, your consciousness doesn't differentiate between you and the object. That experience is the boundary.
Without reference to the specific work: pick it up and see if it speaks to you still, if it doesn’t - life is short, move on.
With reference to ZAMM: if you haven’t already, you may get more out of reading the Phaedrus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and The Birth of Tragedy (trans. Kauffman) than a re-read of ZAMM
As a 40 year old I was glad to pick up the book and confirm that my impression as a freshman was correct.
(It took me three tries to get past the first tangental monologue chapter, and I was deeply rewarded by doing so. It's a great book but not what you may expect based on the title or first chapters)
If someone offered me one million dollars to clearly explain the book to them right now, I wouldn’t be able to do it.
But yeah I drifted through a number of the monologues with a determination to make it through to the end, not easy at parts.
Easier than Godel Escher Bach however! Pretty sure I'll never get through that one
To take a stab at it:
On the top layer it is a mostly true story about a man, his boy, and a couple of friends taking a motorcycle road trip from Minneapolis to San Francisco.
The next layer is significant portions of the book which the author calls a chautauqua which was a thing somewhere at the intersection of TED talks, a variety show, and a university lecture. He goes on about Zen, motorcycles, and philosophy partially through recollections of his own history (spoiler alert: unreliable narrator). The central theme is his own definition of Quality used as a bridge between exacting analytical logic, "western thought" and emotional, subjective, artistic, "eastern thought", and beauty.
On the third layer, you get to watch the author, who experienced significant mental health issues (I think schizophrenia) and electroshock (not positive this part was true) who sort of came over the hill into a more healthy mind but still experiencing some megalomania writing a somewhat grandiose book about his own history and thoughts, his relationship with his son, and growth.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CalamariRaceTeam/comments/5bij42/ze...
Yeah, I know, allegedly written by "Dave Harleyson". Count me among the skeptical.
I think this one is the biggest difference:
“Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.”
For those who might not know: Reddit was pg's idea, which he suggested to Steve and Alexis. Once it started to become popular, Reddit became less interesting for him personally to read (plus they stopped implementing his feature requests), so he made HN. In that sense "not being Reddit" is one of the founding impulses of this site. But there were others too, like wanting a watercooler for the startup world, and wanting to write a web app in Arc.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I'm just objecting that liking one precludes liking the other. I post on both and get different things from each. One can appreciate both Shakespeare and the Three Stooges
Feature Request 2345: Make the site user-scriptable with Common Lisp.The author was trying way too hard to be cute with the biker thing, and the result is cringeworthy.
AFAIK most people are just after money, instant gratification and egoism(1).
1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_economics Most research on happiness suggests it's linked to socioeconomic status relative to your peers, not absolute socioeconomic status.
The fact that you are asking the question could be interpreted as the opposite. I guess.
The bolt here is just used as an analogy for how to address problems in life, balance importance you give to micro vs macro, the beauty and danger that scales up and down in anything, etc.
Sure, it's a smart one, actually useful if taken literally as well, because the writer is very talented.
> The bit about really understanding how the thing works before attempting to repair it is great.
Again, another analogy. The whole book is teaching you how to think. And then go beyond thinking, as an art of living.
Every page is a personal, human lesson. You can stop at the mechanical aspect of it, but it is missing why this is a fantastic writing. It's giving profound advises using a simple, down to earth, vocabulary.
I could have done so with any other gimmick. Just like star wars could have replaced light sabers with something else. It just became an iconic symbol because it's so obviously recognizable and easy to grab.
But of course, they are also good because they chose such an symbology to make it easy to refer to.
You know where you were in class, and the teachers analyzed a book and you though in your head, BS! ZAMM is an exception to that. It is, really, a conscious and deep work of teaching that goes several levels down.
http://venturearete.org/ResearchProjects/ProfessorGurr/galle...
I was surprised to read that this book became/was a bestseller in the category philosophy. I think its an interesting book, but its hard to read and i'm still curious why it resonated with so many people? Or what specifically.
One thing he mentions in the book has bee then electroshock therapy which was not as sever as he described it. He did not forgot his old him.
I also had the feeling to follow his illness with the obsession about quality. But more in a way you follow a schizophrenic. It becomes very unclear to me if he was a genius or became crazy. I had a friend with schizophrenia, he was 60% smart and knew his facts and then 40% have been just crazy like he believes in a stargate and has connections to the chines government. The problem with this person was very simple: i stoppend trusting him even if he was right to some extend.
I had the same feeling with this book. There is a high chance that his career downfall happend because he was in an illusion ale state. Especially at the end when he describes teaching in one university and taking the lecture in the other. That fued was probably very one sided and he imagined it. The others probably just saw some crazy dude.
There have been thinks which resonated with me, like this logically cutting of things. The balance between western and eastern (or was it asian?) philosophy.
I also really disliked how he handled his son. He did not sound like a good father.
Im very unsure what i took from this book.
If you wanted a custom suit made, would you do it yourself or would you find a great tailor to hire? I'd certainly hire the tailor not because he cares more but because he knows what he's doing.
What companies were you thinking about in your last sentence?
More insidious things like final drive in scooters getting prematurely worn due to use of impact wrench for undoing wheel nuts; doesn't show up as much until you start getting grinding noises after 6k miles.
Like I said, delegating quality is hard, IME.
I always do brakes myself now, making sure to clean the pistons and not minimize time spent. I've done 3 final drive rebuilds on three different SH300s with new bearings because the parts cost about £50 but labour is closer to £1000, was recommended by a dealer to scrap (!) a £4000 scooter when the bearings failed the first time at 10k. I've done a couple of steering head bearings replacements too. These things don't save me time, but they do increase my connection to the machine I'm trusting my life with - I commute by bike every day.
I'm the type of person that after putting everything back together has a little baggie of parts that I have no idea where they go.
Mostly though, there are only so many hours in a day. Every hour I would spend in my garage with my motorcycle in pieces is an hour less that I spend playing my guitar, walking my dog, or playing board games with my kids. You know, quality time.
I understand the time argument. It makes sense as a trade-off. For me, the trade-off is different, until now at least - no kids, but one on the way. It's imbued riding with more meaning, like when you cook a meal yourself. Feel a niggle, fix it, feel the improvement, the increase in quality.
As a bad artist, I've always been both annoyed and fascinated by the fact that no one can tell you what "good" art is. ZAMM presents for me a good definition (good art is art with good quality, where "quality" is further explored in the book) that one can actually use, and has been my to-do measure ever since.
Of course, the author himself discards it at some point, but I find his concept of "quality as the relation between the objective and the subjective" to be a great first try. And we all know that perfect is enemy of the good anyway.
Not only was it not, but the philosophical content it did have didn't seem particularly interesting — the long deliberations on quality felt like inconsequential hair-splitting that was unlikely to any revelations of value. Afterwards, I read the Wikipedia analysis on its philosophical themes [1] and felt that it's far too charitable in attributing significant insights to Pirsig compared to the literal contents of the book.
My guess is that the novel structure of weaving together a motorcycle trip with inner monologue and personal history combined with a dash of intellectualism was very compelling to a lot of people, and that's why it's taken such an outsized position in popular literature.
(I'd love to be proven wrong on this though, so by all means tell me what I missed.)
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_...
I think it's also the era it came from. When it was created, it's ideas were not that wide spread and we didn't have the internet, so it was more profound.
It's kind of like the matrix and bullet time. If you never saw the matrix and was born after it was made, bullet time might look like a cliche, even though it invented it. When I first saw it, I thought it was fucking bad ass because there was never anything like it.
Also there a books out there that are good for beginners, but if your are more well versed in a field, you wouldn't find it that compelling. The beginners books although, are often necessary to get past emotional barriers to an issue.
Hair-splitting is what ... well, if not quite all of it, to bifurcate yet another follicle ... much philosophy is about. Not necessarily of the proverbial angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin variety, but damned close.
It's where the, erm, quality is.
(You'll know it when you see it.)
I've had my own issues with ZAMM, having more to do with some of the thinking striking me as excessively fuzzy. I suspect much of the appeal isn't so much as an authority as a bridge -- connecting people with backgrounds in the mechanical (motocycles), and possibly in computers (Pirsig's own field, other than philosophy), to philosophy proper.
And it's got some good bits and observations.
________________________________
Notes:
1. In particular, Peter Adamson's excellent "History of Philsophy Without Any Gaps": https://historyofphilosophy.net
Though also other (and direct) sources.
I’d caution reading philosophy as all about hair splitting. Hairs are split because language is the tool and precision is necessary, but splitting hairs is not what it’s _about_.
What is it about? That depends on the philosopher. The heavy hitters (Plato, Nietzsche, Kant) often try to answer the oracle’s command to “know thyself,” whim ranging over multiple branches of philosophy, while others focus on anything from language to ethics to aesthetics. (And Nietzsche, for example, does not spend time splitting many hairs at all)
I've been digging into the "what is philosophy about" question on several fronts.
The Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu) has a pretty good outline, as does the Basics of Philosophy ( https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch.html)
I've also been partial to digging through various library classifications and subject headings (LCC / LCSH), particularly CLASS B / Subclass BC, generally metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, cosmology, ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, logic.
Another view is that philosophy consists (as a residual) of disciplines which have resisted formalisation under either mathematics (which has laid claim to much of logic), cosmology (now mostly natural sciences), moral philosophy (largely social sciences), and philosophy of mind (now largely a sub-discipline of psychology). What still survives today as philosophy is mostly the "messy bits".
And a tremendous amount of religion-adjacent concepts.
That's not knocking philosophy, which I'm finding quite useful, but it's a reality of the field.
To the point that quite a bit of it can be pretty language-specific... I remember reading some stuff by Bertrand Russell thinking "this reasoning doesn't really work in Italian".
> I suspect much of the appeal isn't so much as an authority as a bridge
The book is very much of his time. One could say the early '70s were when the idealistic rubber of '60s counterculture hit the hard asphalt of reality. It wasn't enough to dream of a world with peace & love anymore, one had to translate those ideals into practical ways in order to survive. The boomers went from being university students to actual employment, so a lot of people started caring about things like Pirsig's Quality.
Wow... had similar experience with HS friend - we shared an apartment together after college as well. Good guy, smart, excellent in sales and business and decent with tech. We reconnected a few months ago, and... almost the exact same thing you just mentioned above. I know something's off with him, but couldn't put my finger on it. He's saying his mom's crazy, because she's saying he's crazy. There's been a lot of problems in that family for decades it seems, but there definitely seems to be some mental illness with him now (possibly been there for decades - I hadn't really talked to him much in probably 15 years after I left the state). Very sad, and I don't think there's anything I can do about it.
Maybe instead of creating an account just to post your lukewarm question you could have tried doing some searches about why the book is appreciated or start re-reading it. Or maybe wait a few years.
Nonetheless, i read the reviews of new york times, german spiegel and others from archive because of my interest or curiosity why it was a bestseller.
My main motivation was to have an real discussion about my thoughts. You can't do that with news articles from 40 years ago.
What and what not the Smithsonian is getting donated, is showing or not showing is an interesting fact, something i wouldn't just ignore but its still not the authority in philosophy books.
Have you read it? Do you have any opinion on it? Because i just read it (just = i finished it 2-3 weeks ago) which made the discussion for me even more interesting.
A lot of books/movies/cultural artefacts require a certain mood, life experience, nature or worldview. Trying to absorb or understand those artefacts without the prerequisites make it a bad experience.
So, perhaps in a few years you'll view it differently. Or perhaps when you are in a different mood. Or perhaps your nature / worldview is incompatible with the 'angle' in the book and you will forever dislike it.
I don't believe there is anything I could explain about how I viewed it that would make it better for you, especially since you just finished it and reached your own (negative) conclusions.
But I think one should regard with some, let's say, respect certain cultural landmarks. They mirror something from the human spirit / experience and it can't be just coincidence they are appreciated.
Bestseller = Mainstream => i'm not far away from mainstream.
And you can take certain aspects of my opinion and argue with them. I tried to convey what i saw in it and what not after all.
Read 5 pages again and see if it hooks you. If it does not, you probably won't like it.
I don't want to 'argue' with what you said because it won't help. You just read 500 pages and felt nothing. What magic of writing could I create to convince you otherwise in a paragraph?
You could try to explain your view point.
I said: "I think its an interesting book, but its hard to read and i'm still curious why it resonated with so many people?"
The only examples I could find in the wild were parts of legal definitions (chiefly "motor-driven cycles") and entity names ("Cycle World Magazine", "Pete's Cycles", etc). There are also a few instances of "cycle racing" refering to the human-powered version, yet I get the feeling this is a use that's most popular with journalists who are not familiar with the culture or lingo of bicycle enthusiasts. The use of noun-cycle does not seem more prevalent in other locales like GB (motor bike or moto being more prevalent across the pond).
In short I would conclude that cycle as a noun has a couple very narrow use cases in modern English, and the Smithsonian needs better editing.
For example:
> The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.
Given that, it seems like a justifiable editing choice, even though it may be a little obscure.
It's also a lot less about actual motorcycles than the title would imply.
Pirsig wrote only two books, and this, the first book, is the more important of the two to the typical layperson.
It's not touchy feely. Pirsig is a scientist and technologist exploring Zen and quality. It is the best example of what John Brockman calls "The Third Culture" in reference to C.P. Snow's famous essay.