Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance Summary

It was the driver of the car as well, her boyfriend, who was next to her during that turning point in her life. Together, they were driving towards a new place, a place where they could start a new beginning: "Your arm felt nice wrapped round my shoulder." For the first time after her mother had left the family, it was somebody else that took care of her and not the other way around. She had somebody besides her that supported and protected her. For the first time after a long while, she felt being loved.

However, she didn’t know how to drive, and was generally afraid to get behind the wheel. On that day, she drove crazily on the road, and declared to never drive again. James McBride also reflected on his life up to a teenager, who knew that bad things would occur in the not too distant future if he didn’t change his ways and behavior. Gradually, James McBride began to give serious consideration to the warnings of his sister Jack and Chicken Man. So he decided, “Like my own mother did in times of stress, I turned to God.” This helped him to cope with all these current problems in his life. He also reflected on his past obsession with drugs, especially marijuana, referring to it as his friend, and it kept him from running from the truth. But the truth was that his mother was falling apart emotionally from the death of her second husband. So with this tragedy, she “staggered about in an emotional stupor for nearly a year.” But in the midst of all this, she did not stop moving, and persisted, as if her life depended on it. Ruth McBride then began the habit of riding her bicycle through the all-black neighborhood she and her children lived, oblivious to everyone’s opinion. The bicycle is a symbol, representing Ruth McBride’s outlet of being able to cope with her second husband’s death by having it become an escape from reality, and yet negotiating what her reality has become as well. This reflects the theme because it shows how these two people, Ruth and

To commence, I swiftly tossed the last layout blind into the Chevy pickup and yelled, “Lets hit the road!” My dad hurdled into the truck and I pressed the accelerator, aiming west toward Hazen, North Dakota. Arriving seven hours later, I darted from truck and inhaled the fumes of a freshly cut wheat field on the horizon. I began to gawk at the beautiful landscape the “peace

The Road, written by Cormac McCarthy, is a masterpiece that captures the journey of a young boy and his father trucking across America. Through the hardships that they fall upon, the young boy and father make their way to the place they had been yearning for, the ‘South’. The relationship between the father and son is their ultimate quest to find purpose and meaning to their lives through the trust that they share. Each rely on one another is different ways, which further shows how their relationship fluctuates throughout the book. Through their encounters, pleading for help for other, and coming to realization of the truth, The Road captures the relationship of the boy and his father throughout their journey.

Connie has a tendency to daydream, so she daydreams about Eddie and thinks about “how sweet he always was, not the way someone like June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs” (625). She is soon snapped out of this fairy tale when a man named Arnold Friend confronts her. He actually treats her like she is the grown woman that she wants to be and this aspect is very scary for Connie. He pulls up driving a car and his car is a symbol for an underlying theme in the story. It is evident that only men drive in the story, never women. The only time a woman drove in the story is the dent in Arnold’s car and written in it was “done by a crazy woman driver”(627). Not only is Connie young, but also she is a woman and the car represents the mobility and freedom that women do not tend to have during this time period. Arnold says things to her that mirror her search for independence. He knows so much about her, from her name to her family’s name, to the fact that her whole family was gone at the time. He was the perfect package representing independence in a way that Connie was familiar with. He stood in a relaxed way, he wore clothes that she recognized, his smile was friendly and dreamy, and her talked in a “singsong way”(629). Despite all of these factors, something was still not right about him in Connie’s eyes. These factors

Confronting crises of technological annihilation and personal madness, Robert Pirsig finds each to be a manifestation of a deeper crisis of Reason. In response) he suggests an alternative to our current paradigm of rationality, the "art of motorcycle maintenance." By showing that our understanding and performance derive from our emotional and evaluative commitments, he challenges the cultural commonplace which construes "subjective" states as distortions of "objective" reality. In so doing, he asserts that "wholeness" or sanity may be achieved only through "passionate caring," and an awareness and acceptance of how our emotions and values shape our

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as written by Robert Pirsig, focuses on a number of philosophical life values. These values include quality, identity, duality, and Zen. This paper will focus mainly on the subject of quality and the effect dwelling on its definition had on Pirsig.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - The Reconciliation of Western and Eastern Philosophy

In the short story “The Half-Skinned Steer”, author Annie Proulx sets forth a tale about an older gentleman, named Mero who is returning to his childhood home and ranch for his brother’s funeral. For the majority of the story, the tale takes place on the road while Mero is traveling from Massachusetts to his hometown in Wyoming. Throughout the story, Mero reflects back on life events that had happened to him. Mero is challenged by these memories, as they easily affect his thoughts and actions, thus changing his life forever.

We often consider the world to be filled with core truths, such as how people should act or what constitutes a good or bad action. In The Road, McCarthy directly challenges those preconceptions by making us question the actions of the characters and injecting a healthy dose of uncertainty into the heroes’ situation. From the very beginning, the characters and their location remain ambiguous. This is done so that the characters are purposely anonymous, amorphously adopting all people. While on the road, the order of the day is unpredictability; whether they find a horde of road-savages or supplies necessary for his son’s survival is impossible to foretell. While traveling, the boy frequently asks “are we the good guy” and the father always replies with “yes” or “of course,” but as the story progresses this comes into question.

In Charger, a teenage boy battles his emotions and races along the interstate from state to state searching for answers as to why his father abandoned him and his mother without notice. He undergoes a few challenges and psychological obstacles as he tries to find justification for why his dad left abruptly with no explanation, “I’m so depressed, I’m liable to just set down right here in the parking lot and melt into that spot of gop over there” (Charger 309). Charger’s motivation to find his father becomes a relentless journey, “He had left the day before Christmas and just kept driving; once he got out of Kentucky, he couldn’t turn back, he said. Might as well see what there is to see”

In the short story “The Half-Skinned Steer”, author Annie Proulx sets forth a tale about an older gentleman, named Mero who is returning to his childhood home and ranch for his brother’s funeral. For the majority of the story, the tale takes place on the road while Mero is traveling from Massachusetts to his hometown in Wyoming. Throughout the story, Mero reflects back on life events that had happened to him. He is challenged by these memories, as they easily affect his thoughts and actions, thus changing his life forever.

Throughout On the Road, the influence of the Beat movement’s ideals on Kerouac’s writing is overtly apparent. As the narrator meanders up and down the country, both the main characters’, and the lone hitch hikers they pick up contain an attitude of restlessness which can be seen in their actions and speak. While hitching a ride from a farmer, as Sal and Dean prepare their story to tell the man, he stops them simply asking, “You boys going somewhere, or just going?” This so elegantly captures the internal state of the author coming out bluntly in the work. The beat idealism heavily places importance on personal discovery in any way possible, not necessarily knowing what that path looks like only knowing that you must travel to reach it. Kerouac was distraught with the complacency of living in one place, and set out with no real place to go, and as he writes in response to the farmer “we didn’t know the answer to the question, but it was a damn good question” (Kerouac).

There exists one word that may just be the king of all misused words–the word that, more than any other, is used with complete disregard for and disinterest in its meaning. No, this is not a reference to literally, nor ‘legit,’ however deserving those words are of defense—this word is Quality. Some of the misuse lies in the basic distinction between quality and Quality with a capital ‘Q’, which can be cleared up quite succinctly. Little ‘q’ quality is attached to an object. It is the value of the object from a sum total of the value of the work that was put into it and of its composition. Quality is the interaction which creates meaning and leads to individual self-actualization. Factories have quality control, where products can have poor

The short story “Divergence” tells the reader about a biker named Jeremy Matthis who ends up in a bad accident resulting in him getting a concussion. As his concussion heals he rediscovers some things about himself and things that have happened in the past while he also has a different interpretation of himself, those around him, and the outside world. In the short story “Divergence” the author David Lynn uses the symbolism of the groundhog, the story title, and the road to emphasize the tension Jeremy struggles with through his self discovery.