The Long Trip Grinds To An End...At Last

At the end of section one when Pirsig first introduces the character of Phaedrus, he has this to say on the forgotten man's behalf: "His wife and family seem to have suffered most...No one really knew him."

The Phaedrus introduced in this opening section is a tragic character, but not a particularly sympathetic one. Now, here at the end of this book, I feel that I was done a disservice so innocuous at the beginning of my shared journey with Pirsig that I could not put together until now precisely why I disliked this book. This is not to say that I hated it, or that reading it was onerous, but that at the conclusion I felt the author himself had been condescending me from the beginning and I found it too impossible to believe that any writer could have such disdain for his own audience that I ignored it for the majority of the book.

I had hoped that this book would be a backwards glance, from someone who had experienced, healed and meant to relay his story. Instead, I felt chastised by a man who talked about the catastrophe of Phaedrus' struggle with a reminiscing fondness that makes me wonder if her changed at all. While that in and of itself is a fascinating topic (did the "new personality" differ at all from the old? was this a question of stability rather than logos?), the early sections of the book present an opportunity to look at the ways in which Phaedrus failed in his examination of the world, the means by which he drove himself insane. Instead, Pirsig waxes philosophical about the glory of Phaedrus' golden years and the genius of his philosophy. While Phaedrus' intelligence in unquestionably high, the pedestal Pirsig places him upon seems hollow. Phaedrus did not answer any questions, he simply performed an acrobatic leap over the commonly accepted line of questioning to ask his own.

In chapter 28, as Pirsig describes Phaedrus' helplessness and despair when confronted with his search for the bunk-bedders with Chris, I thought he might finally be coming around to an analysis of the failures of the Phaedrus character. And he does speak to the fear and uncertainty, but his narrative makes it clear that those  are secondary things, sacrifices for Phaedrus in the face of his search for Quality, and sacrifices for the narrator in his search for his own history.

And in his description of the beauty of the untouched west, he reminds me of my father, if my father routinely spoke to me like I was an illiterate child incapable of independent thought. I rebel, perhaps as the by product of my own generation, against the idea that the past was pure and simple and the future is ruining  all we have left in the world. The past had its beauty, simplicity, and glory. But it also had its brutality, complexity, and conflict. The narrator romanticises the past in the same way he romanticises Phaedrus, highlighting the beauty of something long past and pretending that those beautiful moments comprise a holistically better era.