11/8/2017 Tim Adams speaks to author Robert Pirsig - Part 1 | From the Observer | The Guardian

Zen and the art of Robert Pirsig

Tim Adams speaks to the author in Boston

Tim Adams
Sunday 19 November 2006 02.23GMT

TA: You stopped doing interviews for a long time. Why have you started again?

RP: Well, this may be the last one. [laughs] I turned down a lot of things. This may well be my very last one. Part of it is just
laziness. When I rst wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I was completely innocent. Even though our local senator
Eugene McCarthy said 'reporters are like blackbirds - when one comes and sits on a wire, 50 come and sit next to him'. In the rst
week after I wrote Zen I gave maybe 35 [interviews], though. I found it very unsettling. There's a funny story. I was walking by the
post oce near home and I thought I could hear voices, including my own. I had a history of mental illness, and I thought: It's
happening again. Then I realised it was the radio broadcast of an interview I'd done. At that point I took an RV, [camper van], up
into the mountains and started to write Lila, my second book. Another reason for reclusion is that I like the ideas to generate their
own momentum. But that is a little dangerous because they can sink into oblivion if you are not careful.

TA: I imagine the internet, the sites devoted to your books and so on, helps to keep things current?

RP: The internet is what saved Lila. Anthony McWatt [a lecturer in philosophy at Liverpool University who has championed Pirsig]
is the one person who has a PhD in my work. He has had to face a huge amount of academic hostility. He rst wrote to me with a
masters paper he wrote. It wasn't right, but he said something in it about the fact that someone had written something that made
his stomach hurt. I thought: that's a true philosopher...

TA: A gut reaction...

RP: Exactly. He kept asking me questions year after year. It took him 12 years to complete his PhD, and during that time he would
teach classes, and he would email me a question and I'd send him an answer. So he had absolute authority for a statement.
[laughs]

TA: You must have had a lot of interest over the years, from people wanting to adapt the book and so on?

RP: I had a lot of lm oers. Robert Redford made three dierent oers. But they insist on the right to change anything they please
without asking me. I told Wendy [Pirsig's wife] she should sell it as soon as I die. I'm 78 now: someone might as well make some
money from it. Redford I talked to twice. He's a brilliant guy. I liked him personally. I liked his liberalism. [pauses] You saw the
[midterms] election result this morning? I think the world will be much happier place...

TA: I understand you were away last week, sailing. Do you still take the boat out a lot?

RP: We sailed this summer up into the islands of Maine. Very rocky and a lot of fog. It's the same old boat I describe in Lila - 32
years old now and in better shape than when I bought it. I modied a few things. It's a Norwegian boat, a double-ender. It is
famous for its ability to survive storms. We survived the Fastnet storm in 1979, when 15 people died. We got through without any
trouble, though we were scared to death. I look after it well. I gure if you are going to write a book on maintenance, you better do
something!

TA: I guess it is in some ways the ultimate 'dynamic of quality', sailing - everything changing minute by minute?

RP: Yes everything is always moving. Our GPS quit last time.

TA: You were back on the stars...?

RP: Not quite. In the end I managed to rig something up with the computer. There is something about the sea, I can't be away from
it too long. It's like the old Maseeld poem [Sea Fever, which begins 'I must go down to the seas again']. It's to do with the fact no
one owns it. And if you get out of the sight of land, something happens.

TA: You have crossed the Atlantic a few times?

RP: We went over to England from St Pierre in Newfoundland. After 21 days we arrived at the Isles of Scilly and stayed in
Falmouth for the winter. This was 1979. Then our visa expired and we went to the Netherlands. Our daughter was born there and
they kicked us out. So we went to Norway for a while, then Sweden. We had not much money then. Then Nell got a bit big for the
boat. She was having trouble in school because everyone spoke Swedish. We sailed back through Denmark and into the canals of
Germany. At one point, I will never forget, we were in Belgium at Liege, there was an English barge behind us and Nell got o and a
little girl got o this barge and started speaking to her in English and Nell took her hands and would not let her go. She was about
three and it was the rst time she had met someone her own age whom she could understand. I thought then it was time to come
home. So we took o through the canals to France, I didn't want Nell to cross the Atlantic, too dangerous, so she ew back with
Wendy and a couple of friends helped me to get to the Caribbean.

TA: Did you keep a journal of all that? Do you write one now?

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RP: I didn't but Wendy did. She still does write. I can't predict what Wendy will do when I am gone. But I am 22 years older than
she is; when I met her I was on the boat. She was a newspaper reporter and wanted to interview me, so I said: Why don't you stay
for a while? She's still here. So I guess she will write the authoritative biography. She knows everything. [laughs] We have had a
wonderful time together.

TA: What about archive material for the books. It sounds in Lila that you were an obsessive note-taker?

RP: I took notes on Zen before I started to make the trip. I'm not sure now what I wrote on the trip but as soon as I got back I made
these slips that I described at the beginning of Lila. I could recall it all very clearly.

TA: Have you ever retraced the journey?

RP: Not all the way through, but we have travelled those roads. The BBC did a trip there recently. A woman called Karen Whiteside
wanted to do some lms about the book. She came to Liverpool where we had a conference about the 'Metaphysics of Quality'.

TA: I read about it. It sounds like it was quite a special experience for you in Liverpool, the rst academic conference dedicated to
the books.

RP: It was. And Liverpool felt like a very dynamic town.

TA: It's like the wild west up there.

RP: That's right. We were just whisked along. I come from a working man's town, Minneapolis, so I felt right at home there, more
so than in London.

TA: Are you surprised that there hasn't been similar academic attention to your work in America?

RP: Americans tend to be always just interested in the latest thing. The philosophic calibre of the British is way ahead of America, I
think. When George Bush was asked who was the greatest philosopher in the world he said: Jesus Christ. Right there I thought:
'My God, we are going to need Jesus Christ if this guy gets elected!'

TA: It's a strange time to be American. Everything seems to be so polarised.

RP: It's a version of the old capital-versus-labour dispute, I guess. The Democrats, Al Gore, would have won without Lewinsky I
think. I had a lot of time for Clinton but I still fault him for a lot of the stu that has followed.

TA: Have your politics changed over the years?

RP: I have been a lifelong Democrat. I was born in the state of Hubert Humphrey who was, I believe, one of the most intelligent
people ever to get into politics. My girlfriend lived across the street from him and I would see him from time to time. Speak to him.
Like all ideas, though, the Democrat ideas need to be dynamic. It's like Lila, it needs to be kept current.

TA: Alma Books feels like a good publisher for it, small, dedicated.

RP: It is exactly the kind of publisher this book needs, it needs a niche. It looks beautiful too. They are perfectionists, and they are
very serious about it. I want someone who can hold on to it for 20 years.

TA: I have the sense you think the book has been neglected by philosophers.

RP: Well, I have never seen a fatal argument against the Metaphysics of Quality. Most academic philosophers ignore it, or
badmouth it quietly and I wondered why that was. I suspect it may have something to do with my insistence that Quality not be
dened. I was asked recently to write a preface to a book on Plato. I remembered a quote from Alfred North Whitehead which
read: 'The rst thing you can learn about western philosophy is that it is all footnotes to Plato.' MoQ was not that. Plato and
Socrates insisted on all terms being dened. If you start with a term that is undened, like quality, it is no longer a footnote to
Plato.

TA: I read your email conversation with Julian Baggini [for the Philosophy Magazine]. His line of questioning was pretty hostile.

RP: Some people saw it as an ambush. At rst I thought he was just talking about the negative stu so he could get to the positive
stu, but then I realised he wasn't ever going to get there. [laughs] Finally when he brought up that hoax paper [that was
presented in Liverpool] I realised where he was going. He thought he was superior to the MoQ, I guess.

TA: It seemed to me odd to take on the philosophy in that way, suggesting that you hadn't read enough philosophy to be a
philosopher. Your books seemed so clearly about a personal journey, more a quest than a statement, kind of one man against the
world.

RP: Well, yes. Then the only question is: Where have I said anything that is untrue? Baggini jumped on a statement I had made
about evolution, out of long chapter, about knowing the 'how' of things and not the 'why', and so on. I felt that I had answered
that. I gured to start with he was devil's advocate, but then by the end I wasn't sure about the advocate part. I read a couple of his
books, which were beautifully clearly written. He is doing really dynamic stu. I have a lot of respect for him, even though he
doesn't seem to have much for me. I would say he is typical of a lot of academic philosophers. They think: Here's this guy who
doesn't even have an MA in philosophy, and he has written what they call a 'New Age' book, and the bias comes.

TA: Do you get invited to lecture at all?

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RP: I don't do it. One of the reasons is I have always had a shyness. It doesn't sound like it now because once I start talking to
someone I get going. But before I go on stage I have no sleep the night before, and it is just such and ordeal for me. That used to
happen when I was teaching. I used to actually get so tense and nervous before I taught class that I would throw up beforehand.
For the rst few weeks of every quarter it was terrible, but by the end we had all gotten so close nobody wanted to leave.

TA: Are you still in touch with those pupils from back then?

RP: No I really am a recluse. I just enjoy watching the wind blow through the trees. In this country someone who sits around and
does that is at the bottom of the ladder, but in Japan, say, someone who goes up into the mountains is accorded great respect.
[laughs] I guess I am somewhere in between. I enjoy reclusion: it clears my mind. I don't think I could have written these books
without it. People said: Why don't you go around and talk to other philosophers? To me that's not philosophy. It is like literary
criticism. A real writer, like Hemingway, doesn't cast around for opinions, he goes o shing somewhere, starts calming down. He
said: 'I turn my ame down and down and down and down until it explodes.'

TA: You must miss the synthesising process of writing, the getting of things clear in your head.

RP: I'm still synthesising all the time. Wendy and I take a drive every morning. We don't want to lose track of each other, which
can happen in a marriage that has lasted 30 years. So we make it a rule that we go driving around for a couple of hours each
morning, just talking over every possible thing we can think of. You've got to keep close to your spouse I think, which is a very
hard thing to do in America, with everything always pulling you away. I would advise all married people to spend two hours
talking to each other. That's my moral for the day.

TA: When you look back on childhood now, does it seem like another life?

RP: It was a strange life. You saw my IQ? [170 aged 9] I didn't learn about that until I was 32. I just thought I was kind of a bad kid; I
didn't relate to people at all. I was kind of a sissy at rst, in a playground situation, and the kid who is scared is the one the bullies
go after. I used to get beat up pretty badly. When I was ve I was put up a couple of years and everyone was seven or eight and
much bigger than I was. And the teacher made me write with my right hand, though I was left handed, to stop me smudging the
page. I started to stammer. Fortunately the University of Minnesota, where my father taught, had one of the top psychology
departments in the world. Someone there told him that the speech centres of the brain are all on one side, and if you are forced to
use the wrong hand to do things it throws all that out. By then it had created a stammer so bad I could hardly get a word out. This
professor went to the school and presented this to the teacher, and I was allowed to use my left hand and my stammer
disappeared in a month.

TA: This was at Blake school?

RP: No that came later. That was what you would call a private school. Of my class in that school more than half went to Harvard. I
did well there, was head of the class. The senior school was too far away however so I then went from this high-discipline school
to a place where it was extremely liberal. Looking back I respect the discipline much more. Education should not be fun. You are
being brought up into society and society has a way of doing things. It may not be pleasant but sooner or later you are going to
have to do it anyway. These Blake kids knew how to discipline themselves, and so they could learn.

TA: I remember a great teacher of mine reading Zen to us in class. Did you have life-changing teachers?

RP: Well, no, I never had anyone I felt subordinate to.

TA: You were a self-contained child? Intense?

RP: The bullying forced me into my own world. I thought: They don't like me but I am going to do my own thing. I felt kind of
Jewish, if that's not politically incorrect.

TA: You write in Lila of the famous prodigy William James Sidis. It sounds like you had a lot of sympathy for him?

RP: I knew what he went through certainly. They said he was burned out but he wasn't burned out he was just sick and tired of
being a prodigy. He started taking jobs where no one knew who he was. After he graduated from Harvard [aged 16] he went to
teach in Texas - a big mistake, because the culture was so hostile, and he was really oblivious to society. He didn't bathe, he
started to smell, and got fat. They all took him out and scrubbed him down. I read one of his books - brilliant - on the Native
Americans. I knew the kind of loneliness he felt. When someone comes up to you as a celebrity you feel that kind of loneliness too.
I said something in Lila: 'They love you for being what they all want to be, but they hate you for being what they are not.' That's
why I don't get involved too much. No one bothers me in New England. Our state motto is: Leave me Alone. [laughs] Robert Frost
delivers the ethos very well: Good fences make good neighbours.

TA: Were you being pushed into an intellectual life by your father?

RP: Well, I grew up as a university child. It is my opinion that university faculty people are not very nice. They grade people every
quarter, every year. That temperament develops. You know when you talk to them they are judging you. And their judgment is
usually harsh. My father was Dean of the law school. He was very liberal on a general level, but on an individual level not quite so
much... He was a very tough guy.

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