If such experiences feel less available to us now, Pirsig would not be surprised. And this exposure is somehow existential in its significance: Pirsig conveys the experience of being fully in the world, without the mediation of devices that filter reality, smoothing its rough edges for our psychic comfort. When was the last time you saw that? The travelers’ exposure-to bodily hazard, to all the unknowns of the road-is arresting to present-day readers, especially if they don’t ride motorcycles. Most shocking, there is a child on the back of one of the motorcycles. They register the miles in subtly varying marsh odors and in blackbirds spotted, rather than in coordinates ticked off. In his 1974 autobiographical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he describes an unhurried pace over two-lane roads and through thunderstorms that take the narrator and his companions by surprise as they ride through the North Dakota plains. Reading Robert Pirsig's description of a road trip today, one feels bereft.
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